Manchester, that rainy Victorian mill town that reinvented itself as a football theme park with two corporate cathedrals, once again divides the planet into red and sky-blue hemispheres. The Manchester Derby has become less a local skirmish than a quarterly earnings call with choreography. From Singapore hawker stalls streaming dodgy IPTV feeds to Lagos barbershops…
Virginia Giuffre and the Cosmic Irony of Justice in the Age of Private Jets By our correspondent in the departure lounge of moral bankruptcy The name Virginia Giuffre still rattles around the world’s chanceries like an unclaimed diplomatic bag: too hot to open, too toxic to lose. From Canberra to Abu Dhabi, her story has…
When Rubén Sellés was quietly promoted from Southampton’s shadowy analytics dungeon to the bright, unforgiving glare of the touchline last February, the world barely blinked. After all, in the grand geopolitical casino—where presidents gamble continents on Twitter and central bankers move markets with a raised eyebrow—who has calories to burn on a 39-year-old Spaniard learning…
New Delhi—It says something about the twenty-first century that a cricket ground in the Aravalli hills can feel like a planetary control room. On 23 February, when Harmanpreet Kaur’s India and Alyssa Healy’s Australia walk out for the T20 World Cup final, the scoreboard will be the least interesting ledger on display. The real balance…
The Ballad of Ken Rosenthal: How a Bow-Tied Oracle in Short Pants Explains a Fractured Planet Somewhere between the seventh-inning stretch and the next geopolitical implosion, Ken Rosenthal keeps polishing his spectacles. To the uninitiated, the 61-year-old MLB Network insider is merely the man in the two-tone bow tie who knows which free-agent outfielder the…
Cricbuzz: The Digital Colosseum Where Eleven Nations Pretend Cricket Still Matters to the Rest of Us by Our Man in the Pavilion Bar, Nursing a Warm G&T and Existential Dread Somewhere between the fall of the British Empire and the rise of TikTok attention spans, cricket convinced itself it was still a global sport. Enter…
Rasmus Højlund to Napoli: A Nordic Tragedy in Three Acts, Starring the Global Transfer Market as Itself The rumour, like a cheap espresso in Naples’ back alleys, is short, bitter, and impossible to ignore: Manchester United’s Viking-in-residence, Rasmus Højlund, is being courted by Napoli. On paper it’s a mere line in the sports pages; in…
Dying Light: The Beast – A Post-Apocalyptic Mirror Held Up to a Planet Already Half-Dead by Dave’s International Affairs Correspondent, still waiting for the vaccine against bad decisions Somewhere between the radioactive puddle that was once Chernobyl and the smog-choked skyline of Lahore, Techland announced “Dying Light: The Beast,” a standalone expansion so grim it…
Aloha, collateral damage: why the University of Hawai‘i football program has become the world’s most ironic geopolitical metaphor By the time the University of Hawai‘i Rainbow Warriors kicked off their 2024 season, the South China Sea had already seen three near-collision incidents between rival coast guards, the Red Sea was a floating insurance write-off, and…
The Manchester Derby: A 90-Minute Metaphor for a World Splitting at the Seams By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic LONDON—In a week when the Arctic Circle recorded its first-ever 29 °C and the global debt clock ticked past $315 trillion, roughly 700 million people still found the emotional bandwidth to…
The word “lakers” once conjured images of placid water, maybe a loon or two, and retirees in sunhats bragging about their cottage’s septic tank. Today, in the global lexicon, it is shorthand for the Los Angeles Lakers—an itinerant circus that has managed to export American angst, sneaker theology, and the concept of competitive nepotism to…
Raiders vs Broncos: A Proxy War in Pads and Helmets By Silas Crowe, International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker From the vantage point of a press box high above Las Vegas’s neon necropolis, one can almost hear the geopolitics crackling beneath the cleats. The Raiders and Broncos are, on paper, an American football fixture—one of those tidy…
