Dear Louisa, I hope you’ve been enjoying yourself so far. I have a serious question to ask you; in fact, I have a serious piece of begging to do. May I please switch teams, just for game 4? It’s not the Texas collapse that leads me to this …
Dear Louisa, I’m going for Texas, if for no other reason than because A-Rod taking a called third strike is one of the first things that happens when you get to heaven. The Rangers did so many things on Friday night that made me like them: …
Dear Louisa, I’m very excited to be writing about the World Series with you. When I moved to America, I knew that it was important to find a sport, something to fill the void that my enforced separation from Arsenal Football Club was going to…
Sunday was a moral victory: Spain clearly deserved to win not only the World Cup but also the actual game at hand. The great Johann Cruyff came out today and accused the Dutch of being anti-football and, among other crimes, “hermetic.” He’s …
There are two games left. The third place playoff takes place on Saturday, Uruguay against Germany in a game often described as one nobody wants to play in. It can be well worth watching though—teams have been known to forget about tactics and play…
The semi-finals of this World Cup have led to an earth shattering cosmic twist: everybody now likes Germany. Most of the credit for this goes down to the way they play. Germany was dazzling to watch, especially in the crushing of Argentina and Eng…
Over the past year, Diego Maradona has had Argentinians scratching their heads. Why wouldn’t he pick a settled team for the qualification campaign? Instead he chopped and changed his lineup, running through seventy-five players. For a time, it look…
England's performance was in a different league of awfulness from the regular awfulness that had been seen in earlier games. Before, the problem had been one of not seeming to care; the players behaving as though they deserved to win by virtue of the…
So far in the World Cup, it’s Donald Rumsfeld 1 Pele 0. The former Defense Secretary’s sneering dismissal of Old Europe seems, in this realm anyway, prophetic, as anciens regimes slink home to the continent in disgrace; while Pele’s famous pronounc…
The stars of this World Cup have all been letdowns. Messi, despite some flashes outside the box, hasn’t scored, Rooney and Kaka look exhausted, Robben and Drogba are injured, and Cristiano Ronaldo is so vile that his very existence is a disappointm…
I had thought earlier that I might write in praise of indolence—of the joys of spending six hours lying on the sofa watching football. It had crossed my mind to say to those who complain that this World Cup isn't living up to their expectations: "I…
Spain lost. France was (I feel quietly confident in using the past tense) awful. Brazil struggled to break down the obdurate North Koreans. As I write this, Germany just lost to Serbia who already lost to Ghana making Group D impossible to predict. J…
For the soccerati, the fashionable book for this World Cup is Soccernomics by Simon Kuper, which is, as the title suggests, Freakonomics but about soccer. It has the first explanation of game theory I’ve ever understood and the unlikely thesis that…
A few Saturdays ago, Inter Milan, an Italian team without any Italian players that's coached by a Portuguese, won the Champions League final against Bayern Munich, a German team, coached by a Dutchman, whose two best players are Dutch and French, kno…
A director’s take on the 2010 World Cup. If you want to have a successful World Cup you have to have one team that you absolutely want to win. Three is even better. Five is fantastic. More than seven and you'll start to have trouble keeping them s…
A director’s take on the 2010 World Cup.The World Cup operates as a get-out-of-jail-free card for soccer fans. For nine months of the year, our moods are, to an extent that is profoundly unhealthy, determined by the fortunes of our team: win on Satur…