For a period of about 20 years, from 1989 until 2009, I saw nearly every match the U.S. national soccer team played. Many of them in person. Most of the rest via television. I knew those teams, especially those from the World Cup teams of 1990 through 2002, as well as I have ever known […]

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The biggest sports event in a decade to be held in the UAE begins in 226 days. That would be the Fifa Under 17 World Cup, comprising teams from 24 nations playing 52 games in six cities over 23 days of competition, beginning on October 17. Some big events come through here, but the scale […]

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And so it continues: What seems like the majority of U.S. soccer fans wanting to know where the hell Landon Donovan is, and … and well, how dare he!?! not report for every training session. An hour early. The day before. The latest misguided critic to weigh in is an ESPN blogger named Jeff Carlisle, […]

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Hunting seasons in most parts of the world are of limited duration.  A month maybe. A few weeks. The rest of the year the creatures on the other side of the guns can live in peace. Landon Donovan, however, tends to be targeted by many U.S. soccer fans every day of the year. It’s always […]

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A person leaves town … switches states .. crosses an ocean … and eventually his sports preferences morph. It’s one of those things that you don’t realize until you do a sort of internal check. “Which teams’ results do I follow? Which have I stopped tracking? Which teams can make me feel a little better […]

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In my time in the UAE, the senior national soccer team has been, mostly, wretched. The Emirati footballers completed a hapless campaign in the final round of qualifying for the 2010 World Cup just after I arrived in Abu Dhabi, in late 2009, but I heard about it, and the reverberations could still be felt. […]

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I find the notion of “2013” awkward. It’s the 13. Not a felicitous number. Though it does sound more like a football score than anything we have had in a while. Which is good. Moreso than 20-10 or 20-09, certainly, or even 20-07. Just looking at it, it seems as if it is a prime […]

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This was a story that developed overnight. Or perhaps it is more correct to describe it as “speculation that morphed into quasi-news” overnight. This out of Argentina: The Iraqi Football Association was about to hire Diego Maradona as coach of its national team, which remains in contention for a 2014 World Cup berth. This out […]

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The Galaxy won the Major League Soccer championship today, and the way this will play around 98 percent of the soccer world is this: David Beckham leaves MLS with another championship. That is how it will be looked at here in the UAE, certainly. I have two thoughts here. The first is something I’ve already […]

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I was in a bar in Paris that night in 2006 when Zinedine Zidane was red-carded for butting Italy’s Marco Materazzi in the World Cup semifinals. It was a moment of madness. Materazzi was running his mouth, taunting Zidane, and the French star flipped out. We normally would not expect the moment to be turned […]

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