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    Morocco Win in World Cup Brings Celebration Across Africa and Middle East

    Arabs and Africans around the world joined in an outpouring of pride and joy over Morocco’s World Cup success after it defeated Spain.Just after Achraf Hakimi dinked a penalty kick into the net in Education City Stadium in Doha, Qatar, on Tuesday evening, capping a major upset that made Morocco the first majority Arab team to qualify for a World Cup quarterfinal, a Moroccan journalist in the press box burst into tears.A Moroccan security guard at the stadium hid his face in his hands. A roar went up in Casablanca, in Cairo, in Gaza City, in Algiers, in Riyadh, in Sana, in Paris, in Turin, and even in Madrid, the capital of the country that was supposed to win not only this match, but maybe even the whole tournament.But it was Morocco that had won instead, sending millions of Moroccans at home and in the global diaspora into a lung-emptying, horn-tooting, flag-waving frenzy. Their joyful yells were amplified by those of Arabs across the Middle East and beyond, whose Pan-Arab solidarity, if sometimes absent or muted when it comes to political matters, has thrived on a series of shock wins by Middle Eastern teams this tournament.Thousands of Moroccans gathered in the capital, Rabat, to celebrate their country’s win over Spain in a World Cup match in Qatar on Tuesday.Mosa’Ab Elshamy/Associated PressFans celebrating in Rabat on Tuesday.Jalal Morchidi/EPA, via ShutterstockMorocco fans were also celebrating on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.Yoan Valat/EPA, via ShutterstockOn Wednesday morning, having partied through the night, Moroccans in Casablanca were still congratulating one another.“Congratulations to us,” they greeted each other, smiling. “Dima Maghreb!” — “Always Morocco,” the rallying cry of Morocco fans. Their Parliament opened its Wednesday session with a rendition of the national anthem.“My joy is indescribable,” said Zoubida Boutaleb, 40, a communications professional in Casablanca and longtime soccer fan. “I’m still on cloud nine!”For certain fans, the Disney-prince-like looks of Yassine “Bono” Bounou, the Moroccan goalkeeper who saved three Spanish penalty kicks at Tuesday’s match, may have contributed to the euphoria.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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    The U.S. World Cup Team Is Notably Diverse, but the Pipeline Needs Help

    In some ways, things haven’t changed much in American soccer.You may well have never heard of him, but Desmond Armstrong is a pioneer. In 1990, he became the first African American to represent the United States in a World Cup game.Never mind that the United States, then returning to the World Cup after a four-decade hiatus, was humbled by Czechoslovakia in a 5-1 loss. By starting as a defender for the Americans that June day in Italy, Armstrong signaled that his home country could produce elite players who weren’t white.Sadly, with a few exceptions, his trailblazing role did not get much attention in the press that day. Nor did it in the run-up to the tournament, or when the American team played Italy to a near draw in group stage play days later. Another talented Black player, Jimmy Banks, also broke ground on the 1990 U.S. team, subbing in for his initial action during the game against the Czechs. Banks’s part as a breaker of norms was similarly overlooked.Color Armstrong unsurprised.“The disregard was commonplace from the media back then,” Armstrong told me this week when we discussed the omissions. He is 58 now, still fit and trim, and running a grass roots youth soccer club in Nashville.“It was sort of like, Jimmy and I are on the team, but aside from the team making history since the U.S. hadn’t been in the Cup in 40 years, we are also making history,” he said. “It’s just that what we were doing was something that didn’t go acknowledged by many people.”“We were recognized as a footnote, if at all.”Armstrong, right, vying for the ball during the FIFA World Cup match between Italy and the United States in 1990.Chris Smith/Popperfoto via Getty ImagesArmstrong and Banks, who died in 2019 after battling pancreatic cancer, deserve our acknowledgment, respect and appreciation.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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    In Qatar’s World Cup Summer, the Mercury Rises and the Clock Ticks

    DOHA, Qatar — The sun comes up before 5 a.m. and immediately puts the entire city on convection bake. By lunchtime, the temperature has finished its methodical climb up the scale, from unusual through uncomfortable to unbearable and then, finally, to unhealthy. The wind off the bay offers no relief; in June in Doha, even the summer breeze blows hot.This was to be the summer the World Cup came to Qatar, an idea that seems as preposterous now as it did a dozen years ago, when the tiny Gulf country, let’s just say, acquired the hosting rights to soccer’s biggest championship. FIFA’s own evaluators had labeled a summer World Cup in the Gulf as “high risk,” and a single morning’s walk this week confirmed that assessment. Still, for years, Qatari organizers promised to deliver what they had proposed, whatever FIFA asked: new stadiums, new hotels, new cooling technologies, a new frontier for soccer.Organizers, of course, eventually came to their senses, or at least to that one sense that lets humans differentiate hot from sun’s anvil hot, and in 2015 moved the tournament to the winter. The past week, though, offered a glimpse of what might have been.Peru fans seeking shelter from the sun in the Souk Waqif, top, and a rare sight on the streets of Msheireb in midday: humans.Over eight days, Qatar hosted three intercontinental playoff games that determined the final two teams in the field for this year’s World Cup: Australia and Costa Rica. Like so many of the marquee events hosted in Doha in recent years, the matches were a chance for Qatar to test-drive its facilities, its infrastructure and its tolerance for all the disparate guests.How did that glimpse into the future look this week? Both reassuring and incomplete, depending on one’s perspective.Five months from the World Cup’s opening match, Qatar appears to have gotten the big things right. Seven of the eight air-conditioned stadiums built or refurbished for the World Cup have hosted matches, and the largest (and last) will have its first test events in the coming months. All but one of the arenas are reachable by one of the three gleaming new subway lines that speed under and through the capital, and work continues on office towers, apartment blocks, roads and sidewalks every day. Even with so much ready to go, though, to see Qatar this summer, so close to its big moment, is to see a place that is a work in progress rather than a completed vision.Some Peru fans from California took their own World Cup trophy to Qatar. Their team, alas, won’t be going.World Cup messages dot plazas and open spaces across Doha. Qatar bid for a summer event, but will host in the winter instead.Peru brought the most fans of any country playing this week, a raucous army more than 10,000 strong, but every morning it was possible to walk long city blocks without seeing a soul. Many residents and visitors emerged only in the evening, to sip coffees, to stroll the parks and green spaces and to wander the Souk Waqif, the capital’s rebuilt marketplace — filling its tables, disappearing into its warren of stalls and shops. But even as the locals, the Qatari families and South Asian workers, pulled out their phones to snap photos and record videos of those fans enjoying this place they probably never thought they’d visit, one couldn’t help but feel that none of them could yet be sure what November would bring.Organizers expect that more than a million fans overall will enter Qatar during the World Cup — 32 cheering sections, just like Peru’s, but neutrals, too, all of them crowding the same spaces, competing for the same hotels and cafe tables, all waving their own colors and carrying their own hopes.The stadium in Lusail, Qatar’s largest venue, is equipped with individual cooling vents under each seat.A new turf field growing under artificial light at Lusail; different blends of grass are installed depending on the season.Questions persist about where all those guests will sleep, eat, shop and drink. Cruise ships and tent camps may help with that first problem, which remains the biggest unanswered question for fans and organizers. Qatar’s decision to require those attending the World Cup to have proof of a ticket purchase to enter the country or book a hotel room could help keep the numbers down. Saudis and Emiratis who love soccer could pour across the border to bring those numbers right back up. But the tournament also is four full days shorter than its predecessors in Brazil and Russia; if it turns into a chaotic mess, then at least it will be a shorter one.There are still a few months to sort out the final details, to find the room and rent the buses and the boats, for Qatar to produce the smooth-running showpiece it promised, to flex all that shiny new soft power.The heat? That’s so low on Qatar’s list of concerns that officials and engineers now dismiss it with the wave of a hand. Anyone who has spent time in the Gulf in the winter, they will tell you, knows the mercury drops into the 80s by then, and it is cooler at night. Could that lower the temperature, literally and figuratively, in the fan zones and elsewhere? Maybe.The World Cup stadium in Lusail is decorated with collages of photographs of the workers who built it.For others, the preparations rarely stop. Outdoor work is prohibited in the heat of the summer day.On game days it won’t have to. The stadium air-conditioning systems functioned as advertised all week; on Monday, during Australia’s shootout win over Peru, blowers and vents built into the 40,000-seat Al Rayyan stadium cooled the match to a comfortable 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 Celsius), even though it was still well over 90 degrees outside the stadium’s open roof and swirling metalwork shell.In a few months, the last and most elaborate system built into the 80,000-seat showpiece stadium in Lusail, which will host 10 matches, including the final, will get its final tests. The engineer who designed it promised this week that it would work. He had, he noted with a laugh, done the calculations himself.To see Qatar this summer, so close to its big moment, is to see a work in progress rather than a completed vision. More

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    Can Roger Federer Be Roger Federer Again?

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCan Roger Federer Be Roger Federer Again?He has 20 Grand Slam titles, but he is 39 and has not played competitively in more than a year. That changes this week in Qatar.When Roger Federer returned from a lengthy layoff in 2017 at age 35, he won the Australian Open right away. His current comeback is expected to be more about regaining his health than winning titles.Credit…AFPMarch 7, 2021, 3:12 p.m. ETIt is one of the great unknowns in tennis, but Roger Federer is finally back to help change that.This week — after more than a year away from the game — Federer will play his first competitive match since injuring his right knee and undergoing two operations in 2020.But will he ever again be the Roger Federer who defined his sport for so many years and won 20 Grand Slam singles titles, eight of them at Wimbledon? Will he still be the ethereal shotmaker, the merciless assassin disguised as the ultimate tennis gentleman, the master of playing tennis without seeming to break a sweat?Because of his history, no one has dared to answer those questions in the negative, not since he made it clear he would play competitively again in 2021.Federer, 39, will take the court this week in Doha at the Qatar Open and begin a phase of his career that he has never truly experienced: where every surprising loss — and there will be surprising losses — will generate questions about whether he should just call it a career.Federer asked for patience at a news conference on Sunday. He is still building, trying to become stronger, better, fitter, faster, with the goal of being at 100 percent by Wimbledon, which is set to begin on June 28.“Everything until then, it’s like let’s see how it goes,” he told dozens of journalists during one of those virtual news conferences that the world has become used to in the past year while he has been nursing his injuries. “Everything starts with the grass.”The tennis world may not share his patience. His every move will be picked apart for hints of whether he can make this comeback something other than a valedictory. In a sense, Federer is a victim of his success. In 2016, a torn meniscus in his left knee and a tweaked back sidelined him for six months. When he returned, at 35, in 2017, there was chatter he had passed his sell-by date.But the Federer who showed up after that layoff had new power and aggression, especially on his backhand, long a weakness that his rival Rafael Nadal took advantage of with his left-handed crosscourt forehands. Federer pushed closer to the baseline during points, pressuring opponents and attacking the net when he saw opportunities to end points quickly.He won the 2017 Australian Open in the first month of his comeback, finishing it by coming back from 3-1 down to Nadal in the fifth set to win, 6-3, in a remarkable display of grit and shotmaking under pressure. Then, in July 2017, he captured his eighth Wimbledon title without losing a set.“I’ve always been a guy who can play very little and play very well,” Federer said.After that comeback, the Federer legend grew even larger, especially among his staunchest competitors.“Roger makes you feel like you’re really bad at tennis,” Nick Kyrgios, an Australian, said of Federer last month at the Australian Open. “He walks around, he flicks his head, and I’m like, I don’t even know what I’m doing out here.”But will he be able to do that once more?Paul Annacone, who coached Federer to a Wimbledon title a decade ago as the player struggled to keep up with Nadal and a rising Novak Djokovic, said he had no doubt that Federer would again have great moments, even stretches of brilliance. The question is, will he be able to sustain them? Will he be able to maintain a high level of play through five matches of a regular tour event or seven matches at a Grand Slam tournament?Federer, pictured in 2019, has won men’s singles at Wimbledon eight times, the last time in 2017.Credit…Andrew Couldridge/ReutersAll pro tennis players can reach a sublime level for stretches, but over the course of a match or a tournament, players are generally only as good as their average level of play. So how good will Federer’s average be?“Historically, it’s been the older you are, the more challenging it is to get back what you have given up, in terms of time,” Annacone said in an interview last week. “But with the great players, you make predictions at your peril.”Annacone has a unique window into Federer’s moment. He also coached Pete Sampras in his twilight in the early 2000s, when Sampras’s ranking was sinking and every loss brought a new round of questions about retiring. Sampras won the 2002 U.S. Open, his 14th Grand Slam title but first in two years, and never played another match.The journey to that title, with those constant questions, was at times a brutal experience, one that Annacone said could sow doubt in the mind of even a great player like Federer.Andy Murray, a three-time Grand Slam event winner and former world No. 1, is going through it now as he tries to recapture his form after hip resurfacing. Murray, ranked No. 123, voiced his frustration last week after a top-tier win at the tournament in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.“I feel like I’m playing for my career now each time I step on the court, which is a motivation in some ways,” Murray said at a news conference after he beat Robin Haase of the Netherlands in three sets. “But it also adds a bit of extra stress.”How Federer manages that stress will go a long way toward determining whether this comeback is a farewell tour or a viable attempt to compete for the biggest championships, especially Wimbledon, where Federer has been at his best because he is so good on grass. He will play in Doha this week, and then perhaps in Dubai, but he has not committed to the spring clay-court season, which concludes with the French Open.Early on, it’s a good bet that he is going to make plenty of uncharacteristic errors. He will shank the occasional forehand, rim some backhands and struggle to nail his targets on his serve or when he fires at a sideline.“Expectations are really low, but I hope I can surprise myself,” Federer said.For him, this comeback was more about regaining his health than winning titles. Of course, he had conversations during the past year about whether embarking on this battle to recapture his old self at 39 was a fool’s errand. But, as he saw it, he needed a healthy knee anyway, so he could ski with his four children, cycle in the Alps and play basketball with his friends.And if he could do those things, then why not try to use that healthy knee to battle again on the tennis court against the best players at the biggest events.“The knee is going to dictate how long I can keep doing this,” he said. “I know it is more on the rare side for an almost-40-year-old to come back.”Like everyone else, he said, he is going to see what comes of the next five or six months. Then, in the fall, if he has played a significant number of matches, he will re-evaluate what comes next. For now, though, he is healthy and eager to take the court. He knows the initial results will not be his best, he said, but when he rises each morning he is full of hope.“I don’t feel like a broken man,” he said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More