From the Green Bay Packers’ frozen tundra to the frost-bitten edges of Siberia, the name Tucker Kraft is currently being muttered in accents ranging from Wisconsin dairy-farm flat to Singaporean finance-dialect crisp. How, you ask, did a second-year tight end from South Dakota State become a geopolitical Rorschach test? Simple: in a world where supply-chain…
Green Bay, Wisconsin—population 100,000, annual snowfall 48 inches, and, as of last Sunday, the temporary epicenter of global schadenfreude. Tight end Tucker Kraft, whose last name sounds like a budget German cheese spread, tore his pectoral muscle during what coaches optimistically call “non-contact drills,” a phrase that translates in any language to “nobody touched him,…
Jaylen Waddle and the Glorious Commodification of Human Explosiveness by Dave’s International Desk of Controlled Chaos Miami, USA — Somewhere in a climate-controlled war room that smells faintly of sunscreen and venture capital, Jaylen Waddle is being discussed not as a wide receiver but as a unit of export-grade velocity. The Dolphins’ No. 17 is…
Tuesday night saw the planet’s most popular recurring panic attack—international football—deliver another batch of scores that simultaneously mattered to billions and, cosmically speaking, meant absolutely nothing. Still, we all agreed to pretend otherwise, because it beats reading quarterly inflation reports. In Doha, Argentina beat Croatia 3-0 in a “friendly” so chummy that at one point…
Clayton Kershaw Throws Curveballs at the End of History by Our Man in the Bleachers, Somewhere Over the Pacific There is, apparently, still a place on Earth where 50,000 people will pay triple-digit sums to watch one man throw a baseball 95 miles per hour with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker suffering from obsessive-compulsive…
José Ramírez and the Weight of Two Continents by our correspondent in the cheap seats, watching the world self-destruct on a 4-inch screen Somewhere between the manicured lawns of Cleveland’s Progressive Field and the dust-caked municipal diamonds of Baní, Dominican Republic, José Ramírez is busy proving that globalisation isn’t just a buzzword consultants toss around…
Alanna Smith and the Quiet Collapse of the Global Order Dave’s Locker – International Bureau In any other decade, a 29-year-old Australian swing bowler with a respectable but not-quite-Bradmanesque record would merit little more than a polite ripple in the sports pages. Yet Alanna Smith—currently pacing her run-up for the Birmingham Phoenix in the Hundred…
The Curious Diplomacy of Khalil Shakir’s Stat Line By “Dave’s Far-flung Correspondent,” currently hiding from customs in Istanbul If you squint at Khalil Shakir’s modest gridiron résumé long enough, you can almost see the ghost of every forgotten slot receiver who ever tried to explain to a bewildered in-law why 29 catches for 318 yards…
Kairat Almaty and the Quiet Theater of Post-Soviet Football Diplomacy By our man in the steppe, nursing a lukewarm Baltika and a colder worldview Almaty, Kazakhstan – On any given Thursday night, while the rest of the planet obsesses over VAR melodramas in the Premier League or the latest cryptocurrency stadium naming-rights fiasco, a modest…
The Ballad of Lamine Yamal: A 17-Year-Old Who Makes the Rest of Us Look Like Underachievers By Dave’s Cynical Foreign Correspondent, somewhere between the Camp Nou and a mid-life crisis The planet’s collective quarter-life crisis took another hit last week when Lamine Yamal—a child who still needs permission slips for school trips—quietly announced himself as…
Ansu Fati Is 21 Going on 31 and the Whole World Is Watching Him Age in Fast-Forward By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, sipping a €17 airport cortado Barcelona—When Ansu Fati was 17, he looked 12 and played like a 27-year-old who had already read the spoiler ending of every defender’s autobiography. Four knee…
Shay Given and the Fine Art of Waiting for Armageddon in a Green Jersey By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over the Irish Sea In the grand, gaudy theatre of world football, strikers are the demigods who buy Bugattis on whim, managers are the messiahs who last six months and leave clutching golden…
