UAB vs Tennessee: A Microscopic Proxy War in the Coliseum of American Excess By Our Man in Exile, filing from a hotel minibar somewhere east of anywhere that matters Somewhere between the opioid belt and the Bible belt—geography gets fuzzy when you’re jet-lagged on cheap bourbon and cheaper philosophy—a football game broke out last Saturday…
Old Trafford’s Schedule: The World’s Favorite Soap Opera, Now in 38 Terrifying Episodes By Our Correspondent in a Café Where Even the Wi-Fi Has Stockholm Syndrome The moment the Premier League fixture computer spat out Manchester United’s 2024-25 calendar, three time zones flinched, two hedge funds recalibrated their Asian advertising budgets, and a bar in…
Port Vale’s Promotion: Proof the Apocalypse Has a Second Division By Our Man in the Potteries, Still Scrubbing Stains Off His Notebook Burslem, England – While the rest of the planet argued over whose nuclear submarine could park closest to Taiwan, 10,000 souls in Stoke-on-Trent spent Saturday screaming at a muddy rectangle because a sphere…
Sri Lanka vs Bangladesh: The Cricket Match the World Pretended to Care About By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk (and a bottle of duty-free arrack) Colombo, 7:30 a.m. local time: the sun is already punishing the pavement, the tea is strong enough to dissolve a spoon, and somewhere on the island formerly known as Ceylon, eleven…
So the lights finally went green in Jeddah, and—surprise!—the same three alphabet-soup teams that hoard 87 % of Earth’s downforce still hog the top nine places. Verstappen nailed pole, Leclerc will start second, and Russell third, which means Netflix can recycle last year’s script and simply swap the track graphics. Cynics (hello) will note that…
Hoffenheim vs Bayern: A Micro-Match with Macro-Meaning By the time the final whistle blew in Sinsheim on Saturday, the scoreboard read 4-2 for Bayern Munich, but the global ledger told a different story: another small-town fable quietly smothered by capital concentration, another reminder that fairy tales end precisely where spreadsheets begin. The match itself was…
The Bundesliga, that charmingly efficient conveyor belt of Bayern Munich championships, occasionally throws up a fixture so perfectly Teutonic it could be served with sauerkraut and a side order of existential dread. Hoffenheim versus Bayern is less a football match than a morality play performed on a rectangle of over-watered grass, watched by 30,000 people…
Ohio State Football Schedule, or How the Midwest Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Empire By “Diplomatic” Correspondent, somewhere between Berlin and a layover in Detroit Columbus, Ohio—population 906,000, time zone UTC-5, export commodities: soybeans, insurance salesmen, and unfiltered dread. Every autumn the city’s pulse syncs to a drumline that can be heard, if…
Real Madrid vs Espanyol: A Timeline of Empire, Hubris, and the Quiet Misery of the Underdog Madrid, 28 April 2024 – Somewhere between the 13th-century reconquista and the 21st-century Champions League anthem, Real Madrid decided that losing was a moral failing best left to the peasants. Espanyol, meanwhile, has spent 120 years perfecting the art…
Katmai National Park, Alaska — While COP30 delegates in Belém were busy arguing over commas in Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement, the planet’s most honest climate summit concluded last Friday with the coronation of Bear 747—“Wide-Body” to his fans—as champion of Fat Bear Week 2025. The annual pageant, part popularity contest, part gluttonous talent…
Girona 1 – Levante 0: A Small Earthquake in the Pyrenees, Barely Felt in the Rest of the World By Dave’s Locker’s Resident Cynic-at-Large The final whistle at Estadi Montilivi echoed like a polite cough in an empty cathedral: Girona had beaten Levante, 1–0, thanks to a late Yangel Herrera header that sent the 11,810…
Joleon Lescott and the International Art of the Accidental Tweet by Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Tuesday dispatch PARIS—Somewhere between the Brexit vote and the collapse of the Turkish lira, the planet’s collective attention pivoted—briefly, gloriously—to a Manchester City centre-back’s mobile phone. Joleon Lescott, a man once paid to stop strikers, instead managed to…
