The Beautiful Catastrophe: How 22 Millionaires Chasing a Ball Became the Planet’s Last Universal Language By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk When the lights go up in Doha, Dortmund, or downtown Dakar, the same curious ritual unfolds: grown adults scream at a sphere while other grown adults scream at screens showing the sphere. From the marble…
BBC Cricket: The Empire Strikes Back—With Sponsors and a Theme Tune By Our Man in the Pavilion Bar, Nursing a Warm G&T and Existential Dread When the BBC’s Test Match Special crackles back onto long-wave each May, you can almost hear the collective sigh of a planet that has quietly agreed to pretend the 21st…
Randy Moss: A Meteor Across Every Sky By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, International Desk To the uninitiated, Randy Moss is merely the greatest deep-threat wide receiver the NFL ever produced—an American folk hero who once famously declared, “Straight cash, homey,” while paying a league fine with dollar bills extracted from his sock like…
South Africa 403 & 194/3; England 592/7d. If those numbers look like a tax return from a failed hedge fund, congratulations—you already grasp the absurdist poetry of modern Test cricket, a sport that still schedules five-day marathons in an era when the average attention span has been reduced to the lifespan of a TikTok clip….
England vs South Africa: Two Former Empires Attempt Sport While the Planet Burns By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Indian Ocean LONDON—If you squint through the smog and the smugness, Tuesday’s Oval showdown between England and South Africa looks like a simple cricket match. Two teams, 22 millionaires in whites, a…
England vs South Africa: Two Nations, One Cricket Match, and the Illusion of Global Significance By Our Correspondent Who’s Learned to Love the Absurd London—For 48 hours this weekend, the planet’s most urgent diplomatic crisis is not Ukraine, Gaza, or the slow-motion implosion of the Antarctic ice shelf, but whether a red leather sphere can…
NFL 2025 Schedule: The Empire’s 272-Game Roadshow Rolls On, and the Rest of the World Pretends Not to Watch By the time the NFL unveiled its 2025 regular-season slate on Thursday night—an event now ceremonially streamed to 195 countries, including some that still outlaw American football as “ritualized concussion”—the league had already booked more hotel…
The NFL’s Global Roadshow: How One League Exports Helmeted Capitalism to a Bewildered Planet By Dave’s Locker International Desk Every September, while most of the world is busy arguing about energy prices, coups, or the correct pronunciation of “GIF,” roughly 120 million humans from Minsk to Manila suddenly acquire opinions on third-string cornerbacks. The culprit:…
The USMNT Conundrum: America Learns That Soccer Is Not a Tax Write-Off By Our Man in the Global Press Box The United States Men’s National Team—abbreviated like a hedge fund that never quite delivered—has once again wandered onto the world stage, blinking like a tourist who forgot to exchange currency. From Berlin to Bogotá, seasoned…
Dublin to Dubai, Vegas to Vladivostok: Conor McGregor and the Global Theater of One-Liners and Lawsuits By Diego “The Diplomat” Salgado, for Dave’s Locker When Conor McGregor first laced up gloves in a threadbare Crumlin gym, the planet was busy worrying about Greek debt, Beyoncé’s surprise album, and whether the Large Hadron Collider would accidentally…
Phillies Score: A Humble Tally That Could Tilt the Planet From a rooftop bar in Istanbul—where the Bosphorus glitters like a bribed official and the muezzin competes with Euro-trash pop—tonight’s Phillies score scrolls across the ticker: Philadelphia 7, Opponent 3. The barflies, mostly German tech consultants who think RBI is a new cryptocurrency, raise their…
Eagles Schedule: The 17-Week American Gladiator Calendar the Rest of the World Pretends Not to Watch By the time the NFL’s 2024 Philadelphia Eagles schedule dropped—on a Thursday night, because nothing says urgency like prime-time marketing—the planet was already busy. Tokyo’s Nikkei had closed up 0.4 % on semiconductor gossip, Berlin’s Bundestag was arguing about…
