Roger Bennett of the Men in Blazers podcast duo has spoken with U.S. and LA Galaxy star Landon Donovan about a variety of topics. Thanks to reader DM for alerting me to this. Landon comes on around the 47-minute mark of the podcast, and does about 25 minutes. Among the topics covered:

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For the sixth anniversary of The National, tomorrow, the newspaper at which I work, in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, it was decided by the editor, Mohammed Al Otaiba, to do something different. Something very different. Our four standard news sections … with almost no words. The mission: Telling the news of the day through […]

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A month ago, I noted with alarm that Landon Donovan, the greatest soccer player to play for the U.S. national team, appeared to spend a lot of time walking during a Galaxy game in Tijuana. Which led me to wonder if he were pacing himself … or carrying an injury. And it may have been […]

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James Milner is an Englishman who plays for the Manchester City club. He is in the starting 11 now and then. Mostly, he is an industrious backup midfielder. With the emphasis on industrious. Supreme fitness seems to preoccupy him. At a Euro 2012 tournament game, he famously ran 1.4 kilometers more (in excess of .86 […]

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I’m trying to figure out how this happened. How Al Ahli of Dubai went from being one of the better teams in the UAE soccer league to being the unrivaled best team in the country. And, like many takeovers, it was incremental. I saw Ahli play last night, against Al Jazira, just down the street […]

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The Asian Cup gets very little attention outside this continent. This is the local equivalent of the European Championships, a closely followed quadrennial, but isn’t remotely the global event the Euros are. Nor is it as big a deal as the African Cup of Nations or the Copa America, South America’s national tournament. But it’s […]

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By some fluke of typically random Al Jazeera programming, I stumbled across a re-run of last night’s Galaxy at Tijuana game in the Concacaf Champions League … And I was shocked … stunned … at the lack of energy in the match. Certainly, in the first half of a 90 minutes won 4-2 by the […]

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Often, some of the best games in an athlete’s career … are those in which he (or her) did not make an appearance. Better yet? Those games in which he was not even invited to play. The U.S. national soccer team played an international match tonight, against Ukraine in Cyprus, in which all accounts suggest […]

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Most everyone who has followed Landon Donovan‘s soccer career, even when he was playing in his first World Cup, in 2002, did the math and came to a quick conclusion: If everything goes well … he would be able to play for the United States through the 2014 World Cup. He would be 32 that […]

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Expats come and expats go, in the UAE. And especially in soccer. The South American or African introduced amid fanfare when a transfer window comes open … often is dumped a half-season later. It happens because UAE teams depend so heavily on foreigners to score goals, and goal scoring is such an easily measured number. […]

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