Landon Donovan apparently is considering continuing on in Major League Soccer. This, after a couple of months of interesting-but-not-scintillating play with the LA Galaxy at the end of the 2016 season.

That he could keep up at all is impressive, in his nine games back, during the autumn. He is 34, will be 35 in March and has lost some (much?) of his speed.

He is not the player he was, especially at the attacking end, but who knows more about the American game than he does? Who has a keener sense of how a game is unfolding? Would he not be valuable as a playmaking midfielder?

Real Salt Lake reportedly have offered a two-season contract, and if Landon can get into the team and play well … maybe he gets a shot at helping the U.S. qualify for the 2018 World Cup, and maybe he gets a chance to make a World Cup team coached by Bruce Arena, the man who signed off on Landon’s return to the Galaxy this year, after 18 months off.

More thoughts:

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I am impressed by how often the cameramen, and directors, of sports broadcasts manage to get images of athletes spitting … into our living rooms via television.

Baseball’s World Series manages to get bearded players spewing streams of brown “tobacco juice”. If a viewer is lucky, guys in the dugout might limit their expectorations to the shells of sunflower seeds.

American football players have issues spitting because of facemasks and visors. It would be like spitting from the inside of your car with the windows up.

Basketball players also have a rough time finding a place to spit; fans are right there at courtside. But another indoor sport, ice hockey, seems to do just “fine” — letting fly right there on the ice, which is a different and special kind of gross, frozen loogies. (You do not want to know what is scraped off the ice by the Zamboni, between periods.)

But the worst sports phlegm bandits? The most commonly seen and most disgusting?

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Well, that was ugly. And perhaps unfortunately timed.

Bob Bradley, the first American to coach a team in one of Europe’s biggest five leagues, was fired by Swansea City today — only his 85th day on the job of the English Premier League club.

He was a dead man walking since Swansea’s 4-1 home loss to West Ham yesterday, which left the club with only 12 points this season, fewest in the league, and looking a lot like a team headed for the disaster of relegation.

(Bradley also battled the assumptions, in the Premier League, that an American couldn’t really be up to the job, especially when he, inexcusably, said “road game” instead of “away match” and “PKs” instead of “penalties”.)

But … it is hard to argue with the move by the team’s American owners, the ones who brought in Bradley in October, because the atmosphere in Swansea’s home match yesterday has been described by British journalists as “toxic” and “poisonous” and the team appeared to give up.

Bradley will not have many fond memories of his 11 games, only two of which Swansea won, or of the quality of the side, which he changed nearly every week as he looked desperately for a combination that would work — after numerous personnel mistakes by top management.

And now he is out of a job … when he might at this moment be the U.S. national team coach — which he could not aspire to in late November, while at Swansea, when the U.S. Soccer Federation fired Jurgen Klinsmann and replaced him with Bruce Arena.

That job might have gone to Bradley, had he not been trying to make his name in one of the world’s elite leagues.

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A pressure washer.

That is what men really want.

I know what you’re thinking. “Darn. And with Christmas behind us now.”

You could have gotten your father, brother, son a pressure washer.

A German company that happens to make pressure washers commissioned a marketing and research firm to get to the bottom of this — by asking men about their favorite tools.

And the key finding?

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We concluded most of our holiday activities on Christmas Eve, aside from getting a photo of “hanging Santa” (above, info below). So that left me free to eat a lot of turkey and watch NBA December 25th games till tryptophan and hoops overload knocked me out.

I saw the whole of the game of the day — Cleveland versus Golden State in a rematch of the past two NBA Finals.

It was an arresting game won 109-108 by the Cavs and events seemed to suggest that the Stephen Curry bandwagon is definitely slowing.

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I like to attend Christmas Eve services. Preferably of the “candlelight” variety. I have attended one every December 24 since I was 13 — aside from one year in Long Beach when we got the starting time of a service wrong and arrived just as everyone was leaving.

Options for church-going in this part of the south of France are not as numerous as in California, nor as obvious as in Abu Dhabi, where the whole of the city contained only three churches, located in the same few blocks of town.

The options?

I could go to the English-expat Anglican service held at 6:30 p.m. in a French Protestant church a few towns over … or I could drive to the nearby “big town” of the region, where a 10 p.m. Roman Catholic service was promised by the tourist office.

I chose the 10 p.m. service at the Roman Catholic church for two reasons: 1) I had the list of hymns the Anglicans were going to sing, and I had never heard of any of them; and 2) I like my Christmas Eve services to be closer to midnight, thank you.

As it turns out, the service was so long that it not only approached midnight, it ran right past it.

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I recently mused about the significance of a big contract for an athlete who had spent years as a marginal player. Being part of a cash-soaked sport but not really being part of it for a decade-plus.

First, Rich Hill, Dodgers pitcher.

Now, Justin Turner, Dodgers infielder.

The former is getting $48 million over three seasons.

The latter is getting $64 million over four seasons, we learned today, when he was the focus of a press conference at Dodger Stadium.

The Dodgers hope for 150 innings, maybe, from Rich Hill, who is 36 and had not done much until 2016. But you expect to pay a premium for (what you think is) quality pitching.

However, the club hopes Turner, 32, will play nearly every day at third base and be the player he was the past couple of seasons, when he hit 43 home runs.

As opposed to the marginal second baseman Turner was through his 20s, when he hit 15 big-league home runs in more than 1,200 at-bats.

Which is why he could be found on the waiver wire by the New York Mets, in 2010, and signed to a one-year deal by the Dodgers for $1 million ahead of the 2014 season.

He got $2.5 million in 2015, then $5.1 million in 2016, and he must have thought then he had tapped the mother lode …

Until this four-year deal.

And it has to change your life, doesn’t it? Especially when you made peanuts (by baseball standards) for most of a decade.

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In France, I cannot spell my own name.

Not because I have forgotten but because no one here would understand my pronunciation of the letters.

Turns out, the French not only have “a different word for everything”, as the comedian Steve Martin put it, they also have quite different pronunciations when naming several of the 26 letters.

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For the past seven years, I dreaded the winter solstice.

Now, however, I am happy to see it, considering what it represents.

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We left Abu Dhabi a year ago today, and it seems more distant in time than that.

Adapting to the south of France, buying a house, getting key renovations made, moving in … that seems like the effort of more than a year.

Meantime, lots of things were going on back in the UAE, a country that will always pique our curiosity, after our six years there working for The National newspaper.

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