U.S. soccer coaches and fans have often wondered who was going to win the ball and who was going to score, but one part of the field they never worried about was the man between the posts.

Until now.

The long line of often unbeatable U.S. goalkeepers may be at an end.

The two veterans expected to lead the way to the 2018 World Cup in Russia are struggling mightily, some unfortunate timing as World Cup qualifying resumes with two games versus Guatemala later this month.

What is perhaps more alarming is that no great U.S. keeper of tomorrow is on the horizon.

[Read more →]

I spent six years in a newsroom that included a lot of Canadians, and if I ever doubted Canada’s preoccupation with ice hockey, those six years straightened me out on that.

Which makes the current sad state of the National Hockey League’s seven teams based in the Great White North of particular interest.

If the season ended today, the playoffs would open with zero Canadian teams.

Thirty NHL teams … 16 make the playoffs … seven Canadian teams … none on pace to survive the regular season.

Which would be the first no-Canada NHL playoffs since 1970.

Remarkable, really, especially considering how much Canadians care about hockey, compared to the often lukewarm attitude of American sports fans.

Rest assured, people have noticed.

[Read more →]

Paris Saint-Germain clinched the French Ligue 1 soccer championship today, which would be fine if the season ended in the next week or two.

As it turns out, the 20 teams in France’s top division have another eight games to play. Meaning the French league will go two months playing league matches that matter little, aside from relegation and winning places in next season’s European competitions.

Just when I might be ready to buy a ticket to the local league … we have landed in France, which seems easily the dullest of the top nine or 10 leagues in Europe.

(I would rather watch Portuguese soccer any day. Dutch or Belgian soccer, as well. Swiss and Austrian. Not to mention the English Premier League, Italy, Spain and Germany. Hell, I would rather watch the Arabian Gulf League, which at least has two strong sides, Al Ain and Al Ahli.)

PSG’s championship is its fourth in succession under its free-spending Qatari ownership and was secured in a ridiculous (if fitting), 9-0 victory over Troyes, in which Zlatan Ibrahimovic scored four goals.

PSG’s ascent, which includes a berth in the Champions League quarterfinals this spring, leaves Ligue 1 as a depressing bore-fest, and I see no reason to pay any attention to it at all.

The issues?

[Read more →]

Consider this another example of the widely held notion that the French will eat anything.

In the seaside city of Sete, near to where we are staying, the town put on a two-day event called L’oursinade — which roughly translates as the Sea Urchin Festival.

The notion that a person would want to eat the gonads out of a two-inch sea creature that appears to be one big mass of (sometimes poisonous) spikes is striking, but then we remember that the French also eat snails and frogs.

This was the second annual edition of L’oursinade, and I believe organizers can fairly call it a success, given the hundreds of people who gathered at the Place Aristide Briand in Sete, lured by the promise of spiky creatures with (allegedly) delicious gonads.

Yes, gonads.

[Read more →]

Ghost towns fascinate us. The notion of a place, sinking into decrepitude but still clearly recognizable as a town or city, produces a sort of magnetic force upon tourists and others with a little extra time on their schedule.

Which explains as well as anything how it was we happened to go out of our way to visit what is left of the little town of Celles in the mountains about 15 miles north of where we are living, in France’s Languedoc region.

Celles, the ghost town, is not particularly well known, nor is it promoted by the local tourism board, and I likely would never have come to see if were I not searching for a road that came closest to Lac du Salagou.

The map had these words: “Celles: Vage ruine” (village ruins), at the end of a road that appeared to run right down to the water.

And there it was, south of Lodeve, west of Clermont L’Herault, falling to pieces, a former farming town now on the edge of the man-made lake and a bit eerie, as all ghost towns are.

[Read more →]

It’s been that kind of season for the Leicester City soccer team, a club that has never done much of anything but now leads the English Premier League by five points with nine matches to play.

Leicester (pronounced “LESter” by the English, despite all those other letters) looked a cinch to be relegated a year ago, saved themselves with a fast finish and have been getting the job done pretty much nonstop this season (only three defeats in 29 matches), much to the shock of those conditioned to seeing the same old four or five clubs win the league. The four or five clubs who are now looking up at City at the top of the standings.

Leicester City joined the Football League in 1894 but are chasing their first top-division title.

City was an easy choice for relegation, ahead of this season, and the club surviving would be news.

Winning the league would be an upset on the order of Wake Forest winning a college football national championship. It would be one of the biggest stories in English football in decades.

Things have been rocking in the east Midlands city of about 340,000 — to the point that geologists see movement on the Richter scale.

When Leicester City has done something good, the stamping and jumping by their fans in King Power Stadium has been so intense, it has registered as earthquakes, according to local geologists.

[Read more →]

When I left Southern California for Abu Dhabi, in October of 2009, UCLA’s basketball program wasn’t John Wooden-esque, but it was solid. Respectable.

The Bruins had made the NCAA tournament 19 of the previous 21 seasons, and added their 11th national championship during that span. Wooden had won 10 championships in 12 seasons, ending in 1975, but no one expected anything like that going forward.

Those 21 seasons, through 2008-09, included a runners-up NCAA finish in 2006 and two additional trips to the Final Four (2007, 2008). During that span they had players like Russell Westbrook and Kevin Love, Darren Collison and Arron Afflalo.

So UCLA mattered — when we got on the plane.

But now …

[Read more →]

I enjoy watching the chase for party nominations for president of the United States. I have found this fascinating since I was a child; I remember watching the 1964 Republican Convention that nominated Barry Goldwater instead of Nelson Rockefeller.

I also am a baseball fan, and was well ahead of Goldwater.

It strikes me that the two competitions — ball and presidential primaries — have more than a few things in common.

Let’s enumerate 10 ways in which the chase for the Democratic/Republican nomination resembles the big-league baseball season.

[Read more →]

In the past few weeks, three former co-workers have reached out with worries/concerns/bad news about the status of their newspaper jobs, and I suppose the surprise here is … that it doesn’t happen more often.

Two were asking for any insight or advice I might have about remaining employed in an industry that appears to be in a death spiral.

The third told me about being laid off.

[Read more →]

This part of the Languedoc is green, rolling and quiet. A big city is one with 5,000 people. Most have 2,000 or fewer.

In many of the small towns scattered among the vineyards a visitor cannot expect to find a restaurant or even a bakery.

But every town with even a dozen buildings will have erected a Roman Catholic church a century or four ago.

Usually it is the most impressive building in the town, one with centuries of history, and one that dominates the town’s skyline with its tower and occasional pealing bells.

But few of these dozens and dozens of churches are open. None conducts regular services. The French are no longer a church-going people, and priests are hard to find.

The local church authorities have come up with a system that rotates Sunday mass among a dozen towns — and the ville where we live had never hosted a service while we were in town.

Until today.

[Read more →]