Middle-east Arab News Opinion | Asharq Al-awsat

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The referee Keith Stroud, with ball in hand, has a lot of explaining to do to Newcastle’s captain Jamaal Lascelles over the penalty fiasco. Photograph: Ed Sykes/Reuters

Referees are Damned by their Errors, Ignorance of the Laws is No Defence

by Barry Glendenning | Apr 12, 2017 | Sports

The fact that the referee Martin Atkinson sounds even more like the comedian Bob Mortimer than he looks was not the most interesting revelation to emerge from Sky’s recent effort to show the human side of match officials on The Referees – Onside with Carragher and...

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Christian Bassogog says of playing in China: ‘Ezequiel Lavezzi is a player I’ve always liked so I was quite honoured to be on the same pitch as him.’ Photograph: Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images

Christian Bassogog: ‘Chinese Super League has the Power. More will Come’

by David Hynter | Apr 12, 2017 | Sports

wo years ago Christian Bassogog was earning £25 a week with Rainbow FC in the Cameroonian second division. Today he is an Africa Cup of Nations champion with Cameroon and, having been named as the best player at the recent tournament in Gabon, his weekly wage has...

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Mbaye Niang in action for Watford at Crystal Palace. ‘I’ve joined a good club, and a good team in the Premier League,’ he says. Photograph: Jason Brown/JMP/Rex/Shutterstock

Watford’s M’Baye Niang: ‘I’m All about Strength, Skill, Pace, Taking People on’

by Dominic Fifield | Apr 11, 2017 | Sports

Recruited to the academy at 13, he had become Caen’s youngest senior player at 16 years and 114 days. In the summer of 2012 the teenager from Les Mureaux, an unforgiving industrial suburb of the Yvelines département to the west of Paris, would spend time on trial at...

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Neymar is presented as a Barcelona player in June 2013 – the legal fallout from the deal continues to this day. Photograph: David Ramos/Getty Images

Race for Neymar: the Inside Story of How Barcelona Sealed the Controversial Deal

by Alex Duff and Tariq Panja | Apr 10, 2017 | Sports

On a July evening in 2011 the football world’s focus was on the Vila Belmiro Stadium in Santos, which appears little changed from the days when a teenage Pelé lived in a dormitory under one of the stands. National-team coaches had arrived in Brazil before the World...

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Gareth Bale has scored in Champions League and Copa del Rey finals but his language skills are still critiqued. Photograph: Alex Caparros/Getty Images

La Liga’s Foreign Players are Easy Targets until They Master the Spanish Language

by Craig Timberg and Brian Fung | Apr 8, 2017 | Sports

n Spain, football is played in Spanish. There is a necessity to find both your feet and tongue in La Liga. In December, sports newspaper AS posted a video of Gareth Bale speaking about his recovery from injury under the tag: “Progress with Spanish, watch how he...