cc Page 356 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Swedish Soccer Fans Wake Up Opponents With 4 A.M. Fireworks Show
CSKA Moscow is in Stockholm to play AIK tonight, in the first leg of a Europa League qualifier, and the Russians were just trying to get a good night's rest. Enter AIK fans, who showed up outside CSKA's hotel in the middle of the night with flares, fireworks, whistles and car horns....

The Soccer Fans Who Ought Least To Go Shirtless Always Do
The UEFA Champions League playoff is like a very long series of NCAA Play-In Games Opening Round Games; scrappy champions of small leagues and barely-qualified major league losers clash heads for the right to face the real "Champions" in the group stage....

Casino Fails To Shuffle Cards, Sues Gamblers Who Won $1.5 Million
A group of 14 people were huddled around a mini baccarat table at Atlantic City's Golden Nugget casino in August, when something strange started to happen. The same sequence of cards was dealt twice—then a third time, and a fourth, and so on. Gamblers aren't dumb: they upped their bets from the mini...


Man City Accidentally Put In Bid For Lionel Messi Literally Because Of The Telephone Game
According to former Manchester City chief executive, Gary Cook, the offer was made in 2008 while the club was in the process of being purchased by Sheikh Mansour. Cook copped to the mistake in the directly-named book "The Manchester City Years."...

Newcastle's First Goal On The Season Was This Curling Strike From Demba Ba
Demba Ba was slow to start his 2011-2012 campaign and then disappeared entirely from Newcastle United's scoresheet after the month of February. It deprived us glorious goals like this one he scored against Manchester United in February....

Who Is The World's Most Recognizable Athlete?
Saw this photo over at TBJ, of Kobe Bryant making an appearance on his annual Nike tour of China, and it's no surprise. China loves Kobe. Loves him. That's a billion people who go nuts at the very sight of Bryant, a global superstar for 15 years now. It got me thinking: who's the most recognizable a...

After 75 Years And 25 Matches, The U.S. Men's Soccer Team Finally Wins In Mexico
No one really expected much from the USMNT tonight in a friendly at Estadio Azteca against Olympic gold medal-winning Mexico (and its super-creepy mascot), but an 80th-minute goal from Michael Orozco Fiscal—and some incredible goaltending goalkeeping from Tim Howard—gave the US a historic 1-0 win ...

Mexico's Official Soccer Mascot Will Haunt Your Dreams
This is Kin, the official mascot of the Mexican national soccer team, which faces the USA tonight at Estadio Azteca. Mexico is 23-0-1 all-time against the USMNT on its home soil, though I'm thinking it's the hideous sight of this monstrosity and not the extreme altitude or exuberant fanbase that's t...

New Jersey Wants To Legalize Sports Betting. The NCAA, MLB, NFL, NBA And NHL Want To Stop Them.
New Jersey has announced plans to allow sports betting at Atlantic City casinos, and the major sports leagues are not pleased. The NCAA, MLB, NFL, NBA and NHL filed a lawsuit last week arguing that New Jersey's sports betting plan violates a 1992 federal law....

French Soccer Stars Will Face Charges For Sexing 16-Year-Old Prostitute
Bayern's Franck Ribery and Real Madrid's Karim Benzema got into a spot of trouble in 2010, when a Paris prostitution ring was busted and their names popped up in a little black book. Even worse, it turned out they had paid for sex with then-16-year-old Zahia Dehar, who, in the players' defense, didn...

How New York's New MLS Stadium Heralds The Return Of The Cosmos
Top-level soccer hasn't been played within New York's city limits since 1976, when the Cosmos packed up for Giants Stadium and took the country's brief love affair with domestic pro soccer with them. The drought might be close to over, as MLS and local politicians seem intent on returning a team to ...

New York City Is About To Get A New MLS Team That Might Be Owned By A Rich Dude From Dubai
The New York Post reports today that the city is on the verge of approving a deal for a $300 million stadium that would be little more than a corner kick from CitiField and Arthur Ashe Stadium in Flushing Meadows Corona Park....

NBC Cut Nearly An Hour From Its Closing Ceremony Telecast. Here's Everything They Didn't Show You (Including The Kinks' Ray Davies)
We knew NBC would heavily edit its broadcast of last night's London Olympics closing ceremony; they cut out a bunch of stuff from the opening ceremony, too, in the name of "tailoring programming to our American audience." Last night presented an additional scheduling challenge for NBC, as they had ...

Watch Some Poor Sap Miss A Wide Open Goal Twice
We can argue for days about what miss is "the worst miss ever." This one is on the list. It is so terribly unthinkable, in fact, that the play-by-play man believed the sure thing goal was waived off for some reason, perhaps offsides....

Soccer Player Hits Referee, Match Abandoned After Referee Flops To The Ground
Benfica defender Luisão (wearing number four in black) punched or shoved or hit referee Christian Fischer during a match between Fortuna Dusseldorf and Benfica which resulted in the match being abandoned. Sure, the officials should never be physically battered, or assaulted for that matter, but th...

Mexico Leads Brazil 1-0 At The Half Thanks To This Goal 29 Seconds Into The Match
Oribe Peralta put Mexico up 1-0 on Brazil in today's men's soccer gold medal match, and the score's remained that way ever since. The big news is that Brazil subbed on MOTHERFUCKIN' HULK (we're a big fan of his, remember) despite him being about the least-popular athlete in Brazil at the moment. Di...

The <i>New York Times</i> Tries Its Hand At Animated Gifs. It Does Not Go Well.
If Buzzfeed and the Times made a baby, and it had epilepsy, it would look like this: "10 Animated GIFs From London 2012." These gifs are different—they're constructed from rapid fire shots taken by the Times's photographers, rather than from actual moving pictures. It sort of defeats the entire purp...

Sporting KC Wins U.S. Open Cup In Shootout Described As "More Dramatic Than Tyler Perry Or Shakespeare"
That GolTV still exists is a miracle in itself; the soccer cable net recently lost its cash cow Spanish Liga contract to Al-Jazeera's new beIN Sports channel. It also lost popular analyst Ray Hudson, he of the orgasmic goal calls, which means GolTV's George D. Metellus served in the color commenta...