Chelsea opened Premier League play last weekend, and I could not have been the only viewer puzzled by the presence of a grizzled old … bum? … sitting among the Blues’ coaches. It looked like the guy had not shaved in a while, and he had the sort of buzz haircut he might have done […]

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What are we? The proverbial “red-headed stepchildren”? We just went 26 days without an elite soccer game being played anywhere in the world. It was on July 15 that France defeated Croatia 4-2 to win the 2018 World Cup. And then planet soccer went cold turkey. None of the big European leagues in action. No […]

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How many times has global soccer gone through this over the past 30 years? Three times? Four? England, standing prepared to stage, on short notice, what appears to be a possibly amateurish — or scandal-tainted — World Cup. Most recently, it was Russia 2018. This time it is Qatar 2022, the World Cup that has […]

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Two things we have learned over the first half of the 2018 Major League Soccer season: –Zlatan Ibrahimovic is the most exciting player in the league. –Zlatan Ibrahimovic is the most underpaid player in the league. Generic soccer fans probably knew about the first bit of information, and if they did not his three-goal match […]

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The nadir was Wednesday morning, July 18. As I rolled out of bed, this is what was in the “scoreboard” bar of the espn.com homepage: –The final score of the baseball All-Star game. –A result from an NBA summer league game. –And two scores from the WNBA. Yes, which still exists. And that was it. […]

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No one will ever accuse France of not sufficiently celebrating its second World Cup championship. Quicker than you can say “Kylian Mbappe”, every piece of national-team apparel seemed to have that second star on it. For those not familiar with the “star” system in international football, a team is entitled to wear on the jersey, […]

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Russia 2018 is over. It was France 4, Croatia 2 in the championship match, and the final whistle had barely been blown before some pundits were suggesting it was the best World Cup final in the history of the event. Granted, six goals is a good place to start. That is as many goals as […]

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A twist on a post from last week. I wanted a France-England final to the 2018 World Cup, and I think most soccer fans did, too, and I posted to that effect. The headline to that one was: Croatia Needs to Get Out of the Way Since I went unheeded by Croatia, which came back […]

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Most of the 2018 World Cup has been entertaining. Or at least interesting. Not often we get to see the likes of Iceland, Morocco, Egypt and Panama in the tournament, and see what they are all about. A case can be made that many of the traditional powers had crummy tournaments — and we are […]

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I have no personal beefs with Croatia. I was there once, for part of a day, as a member of the U.S. journalists’ traveling party heading for the Sarajevo Winter Olympics, in 1984. We flew from New York to Zagreb, and then organizers put us on buses to downtown Zagreb, where we were seated at […]

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