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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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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So, while I had my head turned, Al Jazira fired its coach for being too harsh or too lenient or perhaps too Belgian, Baniyas owned up to the fact that it owed significant chunks of money to a couple of players, and David O’Leary, the Irishman who coached in Dubai last season, is going to […]

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When you cover an event, as a journalist, your point of reference is the team you are following. Even in defeat. Well, of course. The default intellectual setting for fans as well as writers is not “their team won, and why” … it is “our team lost, and how come?” When the UAE lost 3-1 […]

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Seventy-four are dead in Egypt, according to the government, after violence between soccer fans of the Cairo club Al Ahly and the Al Masry club of Port Said. This is by no means the first instance of dozens of deaths at soccer matches in the past three decades. In a three-piece package in The National […]

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This is hardly noticed in the particularly British (or Indian) parts of the world, but basketball probably is the second-most popular game on the planet. I know that several sports have made that claim (from volleyball to team handball to ping-pong, etc), but hoops probably is the real No. 2. Plus, a survey conducted last […]

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I addressed the question, in the headline above, in a comment piece for The National. Diego Maradona is the coach at Al Wasl, one of the top clubs in the UAE. As noted earlier on this blog, the FIFA co-player of the century (with Pele) is extraordinarily popular here. Loved to death. But can the […]

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You think your national soccer team has problems? (Well, if your team is China, it does.) The UAE fell out of contention for the 2014 World Cup today, November 11, 2011 — three-and-a-half years ahead of the 2014 World Cup. Done. Out of it. Can’t survive the second-to-last round of Asia Confederation qualifying. That’s right. […]

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Well, this is a bit awkward. The UAE women’s national team tonight won their second West Asian Football Federation championship, following up on the title they won at the last WAFF tournament, in early 2010. What we have here is something Americans could recognize: Compared to their rivals, the women’s national soccer team appears to […]

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