Anyone with the patience to follow this blog knows that every now and then … OK, maybe once a month … I go on a rant about how feckless is Arsenal FC, the London club I chose, a decade ago, to offer my support (mostly in the form of psychic energy), in all their competitions. […]

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Demonstrating global superiority has been the straight-forward bit for the U.S. women’s national team. The Fifa Women’s World Cup has been contested eight times since its founding in 1991, and the Yanks have won four of those tournaments, including the past two, now that a 2-0 conquest of The Netherlands can be added to the […]

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It was madness. A moment of weakness. Impressed by Manchester City’s stampede through the Premier League. League, League Cup, FA Cup. So, on May 12, I had a shout-out, on this blog, for the club and its players, and the owner back in Abu Dhabi. Big mistake, in retrospect, especially with the publication of a […]

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Been donkey’s years, as the Brits would say, since I did a list. It’s time. This one is going to be a little apples-and-oranges. My favorite road trips as a professional sports journalist. Some considerations: –What is more important? The travel? Or the event I was there to cover? –Or will we almost certainly get […]

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In 2008, when Manchester City Football Club was sold to a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family, it hardly warranted intense foreign interest, let alone surprise. Man City was a middling-to-lower-middling club in the English Premier League, and foreigners already were buying up English soccer teams. Two of the biggest brands in English soccer, […]

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I have some history with Jonathan Wilson, going back to when I was in Abu Dhabi working for The National, the emirate’s English-language newspaper. Wilson was one of our European soccer correspondents, contributing a couple of pieces per week. He often took on topics focusing on what he perceived to be significant trends in the […]

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A sort of silly string of posts stretches through this blog, going back to 2009, in which I ponder the great question of our time: “Which English Premier League soccer team should I support?” This is a weighty and defining decision in large parts of the world, increasingly including (of late) the United States, which […]

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Readers of a certain age — say, 30 years or more — will remember when major newspapers were big, colorful, information-packed marvels of news gathering. Before the Age of Great Newspapers ended, around the turn of the century, it had been observed by many subscribers that Sunday editions, in particular, with all their special sections […]

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I have always liked that journalistic convention … on how to handle a “dateline” when traveling via water. You write “aboard” and continue with the name of the ship. Such as “the USS Enterprise” or “HMS Victory” or “RMS Titanic”. A few decades ago, the dateline also would have included the day a story was […]

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Living in western Europe, the assumption by most Americans, including this one, is that professional soccer teams must not be far from any point on the maps of England, Spain, Germany, Italy and France. That assumption would be wrong. Where we live, in the Occitanie region (previously known as the Languedoc) of southern France, plenty […]

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