Hull FC vs Warrington Wolves: A Microscopic Fracas in the Macrocosmic Dumpster Fire By Our Man on the Touchline, Nursing a Flat White and Existential Dread The Black and Whites rolled into the Halliwell Jones Stadium last night, a venue whose corporate nomenclature sounds suspiciously like a hedge fund that lost your pension in 2008….
South Alabama vs. Auburn: A Microscopic Proxy War in a World That’s Already Over By the time the final whistle blows on Saturday night, roughly 87,000 Alabamians will have screamed themselves hoarse inside Jordan–Hare Stadium while another 25,000 will have discovered the existential terror of a half-empty Hancock Whitney Stadium in Mobile. To the rest…
ISLAMABAD – Somewhere between the IMF’s latest repayment schedule and the 14th daily power outage, 220 million Pakistanis paused on Sunday to watch their cricket team discover yet another creative way to self-harm. This time it was a five-run defeat to India in Colombo, secured via a run-out that resembled a Benny Hill chase scene…
Trabzonspor: How a Provincial Turkish Football Club Became the World’s Most Honest Barometer of Chaos By the time the final whistle blew last May and Trabzonspor’s burgundy-and-blue confetti drifted into the Black Sea like the ashes of a forgotten empire, the global audience had already moved on. The algorithmic eye had pivoted to the next…
The first thing to understand about baseball standings is that nobody outside the contiguous 48 really cares—except, of course, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Dominicans, the Venezuelans, the Cubans who defected, the Canadians who politely pretend, and the Dutch who somehow snuck into the last World Baseball Classic with a roster of Caribbean passport-holders named…
An International Postcard from the Edge of the Six-Yard Box: André Onana as Global Metaphor By the time André Onana mis-caught that harmless Istanbul free-kick last autumn, the planet had already mis-caught everything else. Inflation, elections, climate summits—each bobbled worse than the Cameroonian’s latest parabolic flap. Yet the cameras zoomed in on him, because a…
Baseball, that pastoral relic of 19th-century American leisure, still manages to ricochet across the planet every October like a drunken satellite. This week the Philadelphia Phillies—those perennial bridesmaids in red pinstripes—have clawed their way atop the National League East, and the reverberations are being felt from Caracas to Seoul. Why should a city famous for…
Aaron Judge: The 6’7” American Export Who Reminds the World That Size Still Matters By “Globetrotting” Grigor Malinov, filing from somewhere with regrettable Wi-Fi and excellent bourbon Somewhere between the collapse of the Turkish lira and the news that Beijing’s smog now has its own diplomatic passport, a man named Aaron Judge—built like a Cold-War…
The Thunder in the Void: Why Benin vs Lesotho Is the Geo-Political Cage Match Nobody Ordered By the time you read this, the world’s attention will have already flitted elsewhere—probably to whatever tropical island a crypto billionaire just sank his yacht on—but for one shimmering, slightly ridiculous moment, the planet’s idle gaze fixed itself on…
Bosnia vs Austria: A Balkan Derby for the Age of Collapsing Certainties By L. V. Raković, Senior Continental Misanthrope VIENNA—When the draw spat out “Bosnia-Herzegovina vs Austria” for the Nations League fixture this week, the world’s attention pivoted—briefly—from whichever apocalypse is currently trending to a collision of two nations nobody has confused since 1914. On…
San Francisco 49ers Dispatch from the Edge of the World By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere between the 38th parallel and the 49th roster cut Word out of Santa Clara is that the 49ers have decided what every global empire eventually decides: let’s get younger, cheaper, and hope nobody notices the drop-off in…
Dave’s Locker – International Desk 3 June 2024 Red Sox vs Athletics: A Microscopic Battle on a Planet That’s Already on Fire By the time the first pitch left Brayan Bello’s hand in Oakland, the Nikkei had slipped another 400 points, a cyclone was politely rearranging the coast of Bangladesh, and somewhere in Brussels a…
