What a curious match Brazil versus Belgium turned out to be. It was a sort of soccer experiment: “What would happen if 11 crazy-fast Munchkins with elite technical skills … met up with 11 mostly big and beefy guys with decent technique but marginal speed and quickness?” The soccer scientists perhaps could have chosen a […]

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Belgium is a pretty anonymous country, considering where it is located — bordered by France, Germany and The Netherlands, and just across the water from England. That’s a pretty busy neighborhood, with four countries tourists love to visit. And then there is Belgium. I probably am not unique in this: I have spent a fair […]

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I now am a fan of England, at Russia 2018. And not just because the rest of my preferred teams have been eliminated. As noted a few weeks ago, I was around a lot of English soccer, in six-plus years in Abu Dhabi, and if you are a fan of the Premier League, as I […]

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There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who believe Lionel Messi is the best soccer player in the world … and those who believe Cristiano Ronaldo is. The World Cup staged a sort of referendum today on what has been decade-long struggle between the players and their fans: Who is better? Who […]

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This has been the case since the invention of the World Cup, in 1930: Someone from Europe or South America is going to win … and their finals opponent also will hail from Europe or South America. I became attuned to this quadrennial inevitability (to date) while working in the Persian Gulf for more than […]

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Got to give it to Diego Maradona. The Argentinian God-handed hero/star/drama queen/double-bird-flipping raving lunatic may be the only man alive whose activities in and around the 2018 World Cup could nearly overshadow Germany being knocked out of the tournament in the group stage today. Nearly. We all know what happened to Germany — that hot […]

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Iran is out of Russia 2018, and I have heaved a sigh of relief. Just did it again. A big sigh of relief. It has nothing to do with international politics. It has everything to do with the guys representing Iran on the football fields of Russia and all about the ugliest soccer played by […]

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Germany’s do-or-die, last-kick-wonder-goal, 2-1 victory over Sweden tonight was perhaps the best match, so far, in the 2018 World Cup. It also may be the least popular result, so far, among global soccer fans. Two concepts that call for further reflection.

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The great Gary Larson, creator of the incisive and usually funny-as-hell one-panel cartoon known as the Far Side, has often been on my mind, as the 2018 World Cup enters its second week. One cartoon, in particular. It shows several hugely obese people, relatives, I think we are meant to understand, sitting on a porch […]

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And it’s only Tuesday! It has been a rocky few days for Landon Donovan, maybe the greatest player in American soccer history and, at the moment, maybe the most controversial. On Saturday, came the  Twitter ad in which Landon is holding a green scarf with lettering that reads: “My other team is Mexico” … and […]

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