Sports Then and Now

Didier Dogba is hopeful that his fractured elbow will be not keep him out of the World cup.

When Ivory Coast qualified for their first World Cup in 2006, they were given the shortest of straws by being put in a group with Argentina, Holland and Serbia. They finished with two losses and a win over Serbia, but gained much needed top-class experience.

They are going to need that experience they gained playing in that group this year. In what has been given the token ’group of death’ tag, Group G contains Brazil, Portugal and North Korea. With North Korea looking as though they will be the group whipping boys, World Cup Group G Betting suggests that  Brazil and Portugal will be battling Ivory Coast for the top two places in the group.

Many view the Ivory Coast as a team who has underachieved in the past decade. A squad rich with talent have failed to win the African Cup of Nation since 1992, making the final only once since, in which they lost on penalties to Egypt in the 2006. On paper, few teams at this summers World Cup have better squads. Read the rest of this entry →

Is baseball still America's favorite pasttime for young fans?

My favorite sport has been disparaged, criticized and unjustly hated on ever since the 1994 strike initiated the decline of baseball into an exclusively older man’s game—the new fly fishing, if you will.

The sport lacked the caché of football, lacked the flair of basketball and more recently, lacks the recurring Renaissance that soccer experiences when Americans are patriotically aroused by the notion that we’re actually pretty decent at soccer—a sport typically associated with Europe and Latin America.

Baseball is routinely cast aside as a fading sport, no longer America’s pastime, and a sport more apt to be found on television screens in old folks’ homes than sports bars.

With a resounding smack into Pudge Rodriguez’s catcher’s mitt—courtesy of Stephen Strasburg’s 101 mph gas—that’s all changed.

The game is undergoing a drastic makeover: Think David Gest suddenly waking up one morning and looking like Taylor Lautner.

No longer is baseball associated with men who look dangerously close to popping. The younger stars of today—Strasburg, Jason Heyward, Ike Davis, etc., are revered because they are talented at baseball, not necessarily because their pecs are listed on Moh’s.

The game is “smart” now. With statistics being kept that would make Newton blush, baseball is increasingly becoming a technical game, a refreshing change from the “me-smash-ball-try-dismember-22-year-old-sitting-three-rows-up” game from the late ’90s and early 2000s. Read the rest of this entry →