Landon Donovan scored a record 57 goals for the U.S. national team. No one else is close, unless you consider Clint Dempsey, trailing by 18, to be close. And given that the U.S. does not play as many friendlies as it did, into the early years of this century, it is hard to imagine someone […]

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I didn’t think The End would come so quickly. No, Landon Donovan did not play at the World Cup in Brazil. No, he has not had a particularly productive Major League Soccer season. Yes, he is 32, which is not young for an attacking player in the modern game. Yes, he has been carrying injuries […]

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Not even Brazil lost this badly. Manchester United 7, LA Galaxy 0 — as reported in The National by our correspondent in Pasadena, Gregg Patton. Wow. The Galaxy probably is the marquee franchise of Major League Soccer, with the four MLS Cup championships, and all … but all that was left of them after their […]

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I was in the gym of our apartment building in Abu Dhabi, doing puny exercise, and the TV up in the corner of the room was stuck on MTV. Not my first choice but my only choice — someone had stripped the batteries out of the remote. And then came a blast from the past. […]

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For a while, there, I feared for the republic. Any criticism of the U.S. national soccer team was met by outraged rebuttals from fans and soccer bloggers-cum-reporters. They were unwilling to countenance the notion that the U.S. effort in Brazil was anything but The Best Possible Outcome or that Jurgen Klinsmann was anyone other than […]

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Considering the game of soccer involves lots and lots of variables, with 22 moving players and a referee and a couple of assistants, and weather conditions potentially changing from one minute to another … it was quite remarkable that in the World Cup we witnessed an episode that, far more than most, could be isolated […]

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Sounds like a children’s rhyme. Has a bit of a taunting sound to it, too. I doubt anything like it is spoken in Spanish, but a certain team might be familiar with it, by now. My “other” team, Mexico, did what they always do. For the sixth consecutive World Cup, they survived the group stage, […]

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The hardest bit of staying up all night is the hour before dawn. Well, maybe when it is the second time in two days you have reached that hour before dawn which, in Abu Dhabi this time of year, is a bit after 5 a.m. But that was required of anyone who wanted to watch […]

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If you don’t care to wade through my “Landon’s greatest game post” (referenced in the previous entry) … let’s make it easy for you. Here is the video — highlights — of the U.S.-Slovenia game from South Africa 2010. It is just under five minutes, of what I consider Landon Donovan’s greatest game.

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When American soccer fans think of South Africa 2010, they tend to immediately think of the Algeria game. Which is understandable. The 1-0 victory. The late goal by Landon Donovan put the Yanks into the final 16, and allowed them to win a group which included England. The epic Andres Cantor call. But the 2-2 […]

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