Bob Bradley is my favorite former U.S. Soccer national team coach.

He is a square-jawed, straight-shooter kind of guy who radiates quiet passion for his work but is a model of steely decorum — and gets results. Whether it is leading the American team to the final 16 of the World Cup (South Africa 2010) or beating Spain to reach the final of the Confederations Cup (in 2009).

It was early in his tenure as national team coach that he calmly responded to what was, really, a second-guessing kind of question when I asked him, as he was leaving the practice field, why he was moving Landon Donovan from forward to the wing.

(His predecessor, Bruce Arena, a guy I like for other reasons, would have blistered me for my impertinence.)

Bradley calmly outlined his reasons, which included his contention that Donovan would see the ball nearly as often without having to exhaust himself in target-man duties. He talked me around on it, and I later conceded he had been right — Donovan was better on the wing, and so was the U.S. team.

Bradley on Friday night had the narrowest of misses in what would have been a historical moment for U.S.-born soccer coaches — leading a club to promotion in one of Europe’s big-five leagues.

His Le Havre team won 5-0 while Metz lost 1-0 to create a tie for third place in France’s Ligue 2, each on a plus-15 goal differential … but Metz goes up to Ligue 1 on the basis of having scored more goals, 54, to Le Havre’s 52.

It was that close.

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The Russia of Vladimir Putin is not a nice place. It may rival Soviet Russia as a bellicose polity that wants to make the world darker and dirtier … one that will stop at nothing to promoting itself and its agenda.

In sports, that means drugs. Lots and lots of performing-enhancing drugs (PEDs) for their athletes.

Under state sponsorship, it would appear, at least according to the story reported this week by the New York Times, based on conversations with the former head of the Russian anti-doping laboratory.

The guy who should have been Russia’s drug cop became its top enabler, and there went the Russians to the top of the medal standings at the Sochi Olympics — where 15 Russian medal winners were doping but went uncaught, according to the NYT source.

And what should be done about this?

The Russians should be barred from this summer’s Rio Olympics, that’s what.

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Sometimes dog food smells … not awful. Maybe because dog-food producers strive to make dog-food look/smell like something we human shoppers almost could eat. Which makes sense, since Fido doesn’t carry cash.

Serena Williams may have been turning that over in her head after a salmon-and-rice dish intended for her little dog, Chip, arrived at her hotel room in Italy.

“Don’t judge me,” the world’s top-ranked tennis player wrote on social media. “I tried a bite.”

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Kids tend to believe their sports coaches know everything. Even if the coach is just someone’s mom or dad.

Kids particularly believe in their coaches at the high-school level. Most of them, anyway.

The coaches are adults. They have perhaps played, at the college level, the sport they are coaching.

High school kids are 15, 16, 17, 18 and rarely think in terms of the strategic approaches to the game; they usually don’t spend much time thinking about anything beyond their own performance.

That changes, of course. Parents become “experts” and begin second-guessing the high school coach. (Or even the youth-soccer coach.) Some parents also become sports writers, and come to believe they know something about tactics and strategy themselves.

Which is preamble to this: As I think back about our athletic history in high school … it strikes me, four decades after the fact, that our coaches could have done a better job.

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Well, that wasn’t very sporting.

Manchester United’s team was trying to get to the Boleyn Ground for West Ham United’s last match at Upton Park, in east London, after 112 seasons there.

The throng outside the stadium was so dense, before the game, that the ManU team bus could hardly move as it got close to the stadium — which some West Ham fans took as an invitation to pelt it with bottles and trash, as can be seen on this video.

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The website FiveThirtyEight.com is best known for political predictions and analysis.

But it has a sports component, and today it produced an interesting piece on the best and worst teams in Major League Baseball history, at least according to the Elo statistical tool.

It goes back to 1903, the year when the first World Series was played, and the first thing we all want to know is: Which is the best team ever assembled?

And the answer?

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Bartolo Colon was called “The Horse” by Angels manager Mike Scioscia, back in the middle part of the past decade. In part because Colon was “strong as a …” but also because he “weighed as much as a …”

That was back when Colon was the Angels’ ace and winner of the 2005 Cy Young Award.

Colon was famously durable and famously large, almost as wide as he was tall, and a decade later he apparently carries something like 285 pounds on his 5-foot-11 frame, as he eats up innings with the New York Mets.

And he reinforced his status as a cult hero among Mets fans when he became the oldest man (42) to hit his first home run in the Major Leagues. Also prompting lists of unlikeliest home runs in baseball history.

This is turning into a productive season for some less-than-svelte baseball veterans.

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Really, I can’t blame France’s Secretary of State for Francophony.

French is slipping in global status. What used to be lingua franca throughout Europe is anything but, in 2016. Most of us know it. French linguists certainly do.

And most of that slippage is moving towards English, and England and France were arch-rivals for hundreds of years.

They latest setback for the French language?

The “official anthem” of the Euro 2016 tournament — hosted by France — is in English.

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During six years following the sports scene in the United Arab Emirates, I often returned to one question:

Why does Dubai not have a big stadium?

Dubai has hundreds of big buildings, including the world’s tallest. Dubai loves big buildings. Much of its reputation is based on big buildings, and that skyline of skyscrapers.

But Dubai did not have a facility where more than about 15,000 people could sit and watch a sports event.

It seemed a mysterious void on the Dubai menu of grand projects.

Which soon will be rectified, it was revealed this week, with the completion of an $817 million, 60,000-capacity stadium.

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The French are not a religious people, but they continue to celebrate religious holidays most of the Christian world no longer sees as days off. Which helps explain why France has 11 national holidays this year, to eight in the United States.

Ascension is one of the French religious holidays (as are Assumption and the day after Pentecost), and this year Ascension fell on May 5.

Which in France means: “Off day for everyone!”

But instead of going to church, the French often celebrate holidays in civic ways.

In the town where we are staying, the local residents came up with a “sports day” (cycling, tennis, boules) — which was notable in the middle of it for the public barbecue.

Even Anglophones are invited.

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