We all love them. Lists. The cheesiest website-hit-driving device ever created. Well, aside from “slide shows” of kittens or puppies. After a long drought, we’re banging out a list, Today, we’re going to go a little exotic here. My sense of the 10 best soccer players in the UAE — and we’re talking about Emiratis […]

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If I were put in charge of domestic soccer here in the UAE, a job I somehow doubt will be offered to me, one of the first matters I would attend to? Making sure that big news stories are not allowed to happen on the same day. In the past four months, the UAE twice […]

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I am back in Abu Dhabi but still talking to people around me about Beirut and my three days there, which were jammed with enough events and anecdotes and revelations to have felt like three weeks. Before we go any further, let’s link to a discussion that a Beirut-based blogger told me about, a discussion […]

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When you are the visiting team in Beirut, you know your night did not go well when some of the local citizens let off a few rounds of celebratory gunfire after the score goes final. It probably also was not a good night when your coach is fired about 90 minutes after the game. Which […]

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Well, it hasn’t been dull. I am trying to dash this off before the UAE match against Lebanon, in Beirut, gets started. I am in the bowels of a battered stadium with lots and lots of history, much of it not good (war and destruction and refugees), and just getting here was an expedition. Backing […]

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I’m in Beirut, the “Paris of the East” (well, some people call it that) … and the occasion is the UAE playing Lebanon in a World Cup qualifying match tomorrow night. I had always wanted to come here, and I love covering international soccer games, so it’s all working out quite nicely. (Including the Etihad […]

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I am fascinated by those moments in sports when naive aspirations and expectations collide with reality. These happen on the field of play, when the impressions framed at practice and training intersect with the skill and determination of a superior opponent in a real game. In the U.S., you see this most often with American […]

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I called this, not that it took particularly keen powers of observation or lots of inside sources. When Sunil Gulati of the US Soccer Federation suddenly dumped Bob Bradley yesterday, it was fair to assume he had someone in mind as a replacement, and today the USSF announced that Juergen Klinsmann is the new national […]

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I don’t know how much attention Mohamed bin Hammam got in the United States. His run against Sepp Blatter for the Fifa presidency was a big deal in much of the soccer world, and particularly here in the Gulf, where the idea of a Qatari as boss of Fifa planet was a major news story. […]

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I love World Cup qualifying matches. It’s a lot like the World Cup, except everybody participates in qualifying. Even India. At least for another five days. The UAE played India tonight in the first half of a home-and-away pair of games to determine who moves ahead to the final 20 in the Asian Football Confederation. […]

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