Wild Cards in a Wilder World: How MLB’s October Lottery Looks from the Cheap Seats of the Globe By Our Man in Every Airport Lounge at Once If you squint from the departure gate in Dubai, the American League Wild Card standings look a bit like the Security Council: three traditional powers trying to pretend…
Tom Aspinall: Britain’s Accidental Heavyweight Messiah in a Planet Addicted to Chaos By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent The last time Britain exported a heavyweight who actually mattered, the Berlin Wall was still standing and most of today’s TikTok audience were gleams in their parents’ overdraft. Enter Tom Aspinall, 6-foot-5 of polite Lancastrian menace, whose rise…
Moscow-born, Kazakhstani-flagged, Wimbledon-winning Elena Rybakina has become the tennis world’s most exquisite geopolitical Rorschach test—blotchy enough to let every nation see exactly what it wants, provided it squints hard enough. The 24-year-old’s thunderous serve is now measured not only in kilometers per hour but in diplomatic ramifications per Grand Slam. Consider the optics: a player…
The World According to Kamilla Rakhimova, or How to Be 22 and Already a Geopolitical Pawn By Our Correspondent in Everywhere and Nowhere PARIS—In the grand casino that is the WTA Tour, Kamilla Rakhimova has quietly become the house’s favorite underdog: a 22-year-old Kazakh with a baseline game as steady as a Swiss bank clerk…
Paris Johnson Jr. and the Great American Lineman Glut: A Dispatch from the Empire’s Edge By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere over the Atlantic In the grand bazaar of global geopolitics—where European pensioners haggle over gas prices and Chinese diplomats trade rare-earth minerals like Pokémon cards—few things feel as comfortingly parochial as an…
Colombo, Sunday night—while the rest of the planet was doom-scrolling inflation graphs and betting on which democracy would topple next, a modest stadium on an island slowly sliding into the Indian Ocean staged a spectacle that, for 210 neurotic minutes, made 1.7 billion people forget their unpaid electricity bills. The Asia Cup final—India versus Sri…
**The Beautiful Game’s Feathered Underdog: How a Dutch Football Club Became an Accidental Global Metaphor** *By Our Correspondent, Still Recovering from Schiphol’s €7 Coffee* AMSTERDAM—While the world fixates on super-leagues, sovereign-wealth funds, and the latest sheikh’s mid-life-crisis toy, a modest provincial outfit from Deventer—the Go Ahead Eagles—has quietly qualified for Europe. Again. Cue polite applause…
Igor Jesus, the 23-year-old Brazilian striker now plying his trade at Sporting CP, is not the messiah of global football—he’s just another very expensive boy with good calves. Yet in a world where a misplaced pass can tank a cryptocurrency and a transfer fee can outstrip the GDP of Tuvalu, Igor’s €10 million price tag…
The Geordie Gaze Meets the Bradford Breeze: A Football Fixture as Global Metaphor By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, 31 May 2024 Somewhere between the duty-free Toblerone and the last call for gate 73, the planet pauses to watch Newcastle United face Bradford City in what the English politely call a “cup tie.” From…
Dhaka, Friday, 3:12 a.m.—the sort of hour when sane people are asleep and only journalists, insomniacs, and arms dealers are still conscious. I’m watching a grainy feed of the T20 match between India and Bangladesh, but the cricket is merely the polite veneer over what is, in truth, a geopolitical cage fight wearing pajamas. While…
Girona FC: How a Catalan Minnow Learned to Swim with Sharks and Still Smell Like Roses By Dave’s Locker International Desk There’s a moment, usually around the 75th minute at Estadi Montilivi, when the seagulls circling overhead look suspiciously like vultures. They’re not there for the paella scraps; they’re waiting to see whether Europe’s newest…
Terry Gannon, the American sportscaster whose velvety baritone has soundtracked more Olympic heartbreaks than a Russian figure-skating judge on a bender, has become an unlikely geopolitical Rorschach test. From Beijing to Birmingham, viewers parse his inflection the way Kremlinologists once decoded May Day parade photos—searching for clues about which superpower is currently favored by the…
