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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I never played soccer as a child. Never saw a match. Didn’t own a soccer ball. Never knew anyone who followed the game. The extent of my pre-adult exposure to soccer probably was occasional videotape on ABC’s Wide World of Sports; presumably World Cup highlights; lots of Pele. By the early 1980s, I was the […]

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England and its relationship to its soccer team has mostly been unhealthy since, say, 1966 — when England won its first and only World Cup championship. During the 30 years that I covered international soccer, 1986 to 2015, I saw England and its team muddle through the same scenario every four years. It was an […]

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What a curious match Brazil versus Belgium turned out to be. It was a sort of soccer experiment: “What would happen if 11 crazy-fast Munchkins with elite technical skills … met up with 11 mostly big and beefy guys with decent technique but marginal speed and quickness?” The soccer scientists perhaps could have chosen a […]

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Belgium is a pretty anonymous country, considering where it is located — bordered by France, Germany and The Netherlands, and just across the water from England. That’s a pretty busy neighborhood, with four countries tourists love to visit. And then there is Belgium. I probably am not unique in this: I have spent a fair […]

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I now am a fan of England, at Russia 2018. And not just because the rest of my preferred teams have been eliminated. As noted a few weeks ago, I was around a lot of English soccer, in six-plus years in Abu Dhabi, and if you are a fan of the Premier League, as I […]

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There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who believe Lionel Messi is the best soccer player in the world … and those who believe Cristiano Ronaldo is. The World Cup staged a sort of referendum today on what has been decade-long struggle between the players and their fans: Who is better? Who […]

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This has been the case since the invention of the World Cup, in 1930: Someone from Europe or South America is going to win … and their finals opponent also will hail from Europe or South America. I became attuned to this quadrennial inevitability (to date) while working in the Persian Gulf for more than […]

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