The UAE national team, the country’s best in 25 years, lost 2-1 at Saudi Arabia last night, and suddenly their chances of qualifying for the Russia 2018 World Cup are slim. A team ranked 70th in the world by Fifa, fifth-best in Asia, may not get out of the second round of Asian Football Confederation […]

[Read more →]

Jennifer Aniston, still a celebrity after all these years, has been paid $5 million to be part of an advertising campaign for the Dubai-owned carrier Emirates, the New York Post has reported. The first ad came out this week, a piece of video that shows Aniston caught in the nightmare that is flying without a […]

[Read more →]

I am now a Jurgen Klinsmann fan — through the weekend anyway. His name has come up, albeit peripherally, as a candidate for the manager’s job at Liverpool, but we can’t have the coach of the U.S. national team losing to Mexico at the Rose Bowl this weekend in the playoff for a berth at […]

[Read more →]

The UAE is taking a shine to the concept of bicycles. Riding them. Buying them. Watching others ride them, especially professionals. The issue here is that this country is remarkably flat, most of it. Conditions which generally make for boring races, among cyclists. The pros? They will get in a huge pack and this or […]

[Read more →]

Is this a big deal in the U.S.? Not like over here, I imagine. It seems as if the Old World — well, and South America, too — is divided into two camps. One side prefers Cristiano Ronaldo (and nearly always his club, also, Real Madrid). The other prefers Lionel Messi (and his club, Barcelona). […]

[Read more →]

This was the mind-boggling score of the weekend. Actually, of the season, so far. Maybe the decade, to date. A team from a hamlet, really, of the northern UAE outback that is Fujairah, scoring four on Al Jazira, the big, proud club smack in the middle of the 1 million people on Abu Dhabi Island. […]

[Read more →]

You hang around Englishmen long enough, you realize that they do not consider their homeland a cultural monolith. Accents can change every mile or two, lifestyles, too, and a certain level of “tribal-ness” can be found. A particularly unique area is what they call the “northeast”, the area around the Tyne River, and particularly Newcastle, […]

[Read more →]

I was not old enough to fully appreciate Yogi Berra, the New York Yankees catcher, who died last night at age 90. He was a really, really good player for about a decade, from 1948 to 1958, and he was named MVP three times during that span, but I wasn’t really paying attention until the […]

[Read more →]

I need to scold the newspaper headline writer for this one. “Matar man of the moment …” is how it started. And anyone who follows UAE soccer would immediately think of someone other than the man to whom the headline writer was referring. That would be Ismail Matar, the Al Wahda forward universally considered one […]

[Read more →]

The European Champions League is a very big deal in most of the world. Especially once we get down to the group stage, which boasts 32 of the best club teams in Europe — which generally means 32 of the best teams in the world. We at The National hold deadline an additional 90 minutes, […]

[Read more →]