Thankfully, sometimes not-good things happen to not-very-good people. Saudi Arabia’s football federation threw around its weight to mess with a 2018 World Cup qualifying process that should not have yielded to their demands and machinations. They got their way everywhere but on the pitch, where they were held to a scoreless draw tonight by Palestine […]

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I have been watching soccer/football for six years, here in the UAE. Seen lots and lots of matches. But very few big crowds. And very little passion. That changed tonight. Perhaps because the teams involved were imported from Egypt. Al Ahly and Zamalek, the two biggest and most successful clubs in Egypt, played the country’s […]

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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 […]

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The UAE has played in the World Cup once, in Italy, in 1990. A quarter-century ago. And a country of soccer fans would like to see their team go back. Specifically, to Russia 2018, the next World Cup. Six months ago, it looked like it could happen. Now? Not so much. What is the problem? […]

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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 […]

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I pretty much gave up advocating the dismissal of coaches and managers a decade ago. Maybe more. I make an exception for Jurgen Klinsmann. This man is doing so much harm to U.S. soccer that every day he mismanages this team leaves them in a deeper hole from which they must eventually climb. The 4-1 […]

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Qualifying for the 2018 World Cup is really the only international sports story of any significance in the UAE over the next two years. Some runners, swimmers and shooters will go to the Rio Olympics, the government is crazy about jiu-jitsu, various global golf and tennis and cycling tours will pass through the country between […]

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The routs rolled across the world’s biggest continent. Iraq 5, Chinese Taipei 1. South Korea 8, Laos 0. Iran 6, Guam 0. UAE 10, Malaysia 0. Qatar 15, Bhutan 0. And that last one eclipsed a couple more blowouts that came slightly later: Kuwait 9, Myanmar 0, and Saudi Arabia 7, East Timor 0. At […]

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On this side of the Atlantic, they have a tired, trite expression for perennially successful soccer teams. Those that dominate their league, pay the best salaries and seem to suck up the best players, as they become available. “Giants”, they inevitably are called. “Juventus, the Serie A giants … Bayern Munich, the German giants … […]

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What I wrote then? Jurgen Klinsmann needs to be fired as soon as possible if the U.S. national soccer team is going to make any real improvement ahead of the 2018 World Cup. The latest?

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