Two uplifting developments for U.S. soccer today, and after that, some video from some uplifting moments from the 2010 World Cup.

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For a period of about 20 years, from 1989 until 2009, I saw nearly every match the U.S. national soccer team played. Many of them in person. Most of the rest via television. I knew those teams, especially those from the World Cup teams of 1990 through 2002, as well as I have ever known […]

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I don’t have a strong opinion about most Premier League coaches. Even after three years of reading about them daily. Sir Alex Ferguson? Negative connotations. A sort of bully. “Fergie time,” all that. And I don’t like calling anyone “sir”. (It’s the republican in me.) But he wins. Roberto Mancini seems a sort of fancy […]

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And so it continues: What seems like the majority of U.S. soccer fans wanting to know where the hell Landon Donovan is, and … and well, how dare he!?! not report for every training session. An hour early. The day before. The latest misguided critic to weigh in is an ESPN blogger named Jeff Carlisle, […]

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Hunting seasons in most parts of the world are of limited duration.  A month maybe. A few weeks. The rest of the year the creatures on the other side of the guns can live in peace. Landon Donovan, however, tends to be targeted by many U.S. soccer fans every day of the year. It’s always […]

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The final round of Concacaf qualifying for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil began tonight, and the most interesting score was this one: Honduras 2, United States 1. Never before had the U.S. lost its opening match in the “hexagonal” (six-team) format for choosing World Cup teams — which was instituted ahead of the 1998 […]

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Some have wondered what Landon Donovan has been up to since the Los Angeles Galaxy won the MLS Cup last month. He left the Home Depot Center with some ambivalent comments about his future in soccer, and one interpretation was that he was through with the game. Since then, had he been wandering the Earth? […]

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A person leaves town … switches states .. crosses an ocean … and eventually his sports preferences morph. It’s one of those things that you don’t realize until you do a sort of internal check. “Which teams’ results do I follow? Which have I stopped tracking? Which teams can make me feel a little better […]

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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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Wow. This seems to be over in the blink of an eye. Landon Donovan’s last game with Everton, during his second two-month loan spell to England’s Premier League, will come in an FA Cup game with Blackpool today. And he may not play because he has been ill, David Moyes, the Everton coach, said on […]

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