cup Page 14 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
World Cup Day 7: It’s easy when you’re big in Japan…and Spain we suppose
After Group A decided to keep everyone alive with some truly weird (and awful) soccer on Monday night, it was time to send some teams to the land of wind and ghosts on Tuesday, as Costa Rica, Zambia, and Ireland will make it home before the postcards. Let’s make it happen, captain!...
No one does the absurd quite like the Red Sox
The challenge of baseball, and the beauty of it, is the length and density of it. It’s pretty much every day for six months, and every team and every player has to do whatever is necessary to even remember what day it is at this time of year and beyond. Over 162 games in 180 days or so, anybody can ...
Patrice Bergeron was your favorite player’s favorite player
When Felix Hernandez won the Cy Young in 2010 while his record was only 13-12, it was seen as something of a first strike for the new way of analyzing baseball. There was no question that Hernandez was the best pitcher in the AL that year, he had a 7-WAR season for fuck’s sake, but the fact that for...
World Cup Day 6: Linda Caicedo is ready to be soccer’s next big female star
Group H was always going to be a battle between the teams not named Germany for who would advance alongside the European powerhouses. There were thoughts that Morocco could go from unknowns to the knockout rounds, then it lost 6-0 to Germany. The last two teams to play their first group stage game w...
World Cup Day 5: We cannot run from who we are
Day 5 of the World Cup was probably the most rewarding, and a great example of how football is football no matter who is playing it, no matter where they come from. We do our best to not compare or relate the women’s game to the men’s, as they’re two different sports. But Sunday night’s fare was per...
World Cup Day 4: Not much more than a feeling
If the story of the first three days of the World Cup was that the tournament favorites were kind of inching their way through their first matches, nothing changed on Day 4. Sweden, Holland, and especially France all had an air of trying to figure out what all the buttons do and what the lights mean...
World Cup Day 3: A demolition to start the United States’ three-peat campaign didn’t happen
The last time the United States women’s national team opened a World Cup, it scored 13 goals against Thailand. That pile-on isn’t typical and wasn’t a drubbing for the sake of sticking it to Yul Brynner. There was no downside to putting up the unanswered baker’s dozen for the sake of goal difference...
World Cup Day 1: It’s their party and they’ll win if they want to
And we’re off. World Cup 2023 finally kicked into gear, and while it’s a bit disorienting to watch an event on a cold winter night from a summer morning locale as the sun comes up, we here tend to do our best work when we’re disoriented. Both hosts started the tournament, and both exited the day wit...
How to completely crap on your legacy, by Jordan Henderson
It’s my fault. I know better than to buy into it, but being so cynical, and assuming that every athlete that seems like he’s above the usual morass isn’t much of a way to live. I wanted to believe in Jordan Henderson, and still do in a lot of ways. ...
World Cup Group H Preview: Why can’t there be more like Morocco?
The women’s World Cup should be, and still is in a lot of ways, a celebration of how far the game has come from where it was even just four years ago. The attention is more, the players, and teams are better, the quality of play keeps rising, the anticipation grows, as does the appreciation when it ...
Deadspin predicts the Women’s World Cup
How was the USWNT’s Megan Rapinoe being thrust into the forefront of sport and society while helping the United States women’s national team lift a second straight World Cup title four years ago? No matter how long ago it feels, the next edition of the global showcase is here, with 32 teams competin...
Everyone wants to love women’s soccer without taking any responsibility for it
It wasn’t quite the theater of the idiotic that his pre-Qatar speech was, but FIFA president Gianni Infantino had to get in front of a mic before the kickoff of the women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand and certainly wasn’t in any more of a mood to take any responsibility for problems with ...
Women’s World Cup Group G preview: Italy and Argentina, you're in the middle of the ride
There’s a clear top and bottom in Group G. Sweden is No. 3 in the world and has every bit of skill needed to win the whole tournament. It’ll be a minor miracle if South Africa picks up a point before a return flight to Johannesburg. The most important game of Group G will be contested by the two tea...
Women's World Cup Group F Preview: Can happiness buy France the whole thing?
Sadly, the story for a lot of teams in this World Cup are those taking the field in spite, or directly to spite, their FAs. Canada, Spain, England, Nigeria, Haiti don’t even complete the list of teams that are having problems with their governing organizations as they enter the biggest tournament in...
Women’s World Cup preview: The Americans will run into trouble in Group E
The most deceiving thing about the United States women’s national team’s chances of a three-peat isn’t that it has a major target on its back and therefore is part of the game plan to knock out from every other nation in Australia and New Zealand. That was true for the 2019 showcase in France. How’d...
How about some real stakes for the NBA In-Season Tourney?
If the NBA’s goal with its in-season tournament is to simply further pad its upcoming national television rights deals, that’s fine. A few more nationally televised contests will always increase the package, and the players on the floor for these games will compete. However, stars won’t change their...
Saudi Arabian money is bleeding into the sports world
In 2017, one of the top chess players in the world announced she wasn’t going to play at the World Championships this year in Saudi Arabia. Anna Muzychuk cited the conditions that women would have to play in on her Facebook post, she explained she didn’t want to be accompanied by a man when she trav...
World Cup Group D Preview: Can England complete the set?
The question in all sports has been that once you break through and win, does winning again become easier? Is the mental block gone? Or does the pressure simply build even more, as triumphs go from hoped for to expected? This is only one of the few things that England will be wrestling with at the W...
The Gold Cup was never about lifting another trophy for the US
The reinforcements won’t be coming from this group. Outside of goalkeeper Matt Turner — whose status as the unquestioned No. 1 goalkeeper for the United States men’s national team didn’t change after five games in this year’s CONCACAF Gold Cup — what player from this American squad that only defeate...
Women’s World Cup preview: Can the Japanese bookend the American’s dominance from Group C?
This should be pretty straightforward. It’s a matter of whether Spain or Japan advances from Group C as the winners, and who heads to the knockout stage as runners-up. That leaves Costa Rica and Zambia leaving Oceania early, but does anything exactly go to plan on the world stage? Group C has as cle...