…. so much so that I haven’t had much of a chance to really blog about it. I’m going to try and play a little catch-up here … topically …
Team USA: “If you’re not ready to play, you shouldn’t be out on that pitch.”
This was a pretty darn pathetic performance, and served to demonstrate only one thing — that the FIFA rankings are meaningless. (USA was rated fifth in the world coming into the tournament. They came out of it without a win.) The team seemed to be sleepwalking through their first match vs. Costa Rica, prompting the remark (from ABC/ESPN commentator Marcello Balboa) that leads this section. Somehow they woke up enough to pull out a tie against Italy, in a match that was largely sabotaged by miserable officiating (see topic below). Then came Ghana — in a match that was a must-win for both teams, it was the Ghana side that had more motivation, more drive — and didn’t rely solely on its goalkeeper for defense. I didn’t even watch that match through to the end.
Three games and out. Sad, really.
Commentary and Language: Pointless trivia vs. “Gooooooooooooooooal!”
It has been said that American audiences don’t care about soccer; that they find it boring. Now either the majority of commentators on ABC/ESPN (with the exception of former players like Balboa and Alexi Lalas) know absolutely nothing about the game, or they don’t care. For the first two weekends of matches, Joe and I watched in English and were treated to an endless stream of trivia, graphics that blocked the action on screen, and a degree of fatuousness that often left us yelling in frustration.
Then we started watching on Univision instead. Joe says he can get about one word in three, and I get about one in ten — although I think it’s getting better, as the immersion brings up memories of two years of high school Spanish lessons, nigh on 25 years gone. The impression we get is that the commentary is actually about the game and the players — not politics, gossip and trivia. And without that kind of distraction, it is actually a lot easier to focus on the action, the strategy, the hits and misses — in short, the game itself. Which doesn’t need trivia and gossip to make it exciting.
Univision’s ratings for World Cup 2006 matches are the highest they have ever been. I can’t help but think there are many more English speakers who made the same switch Joe and I did.
Officiating: Theatrics and Cards
I don’t have a long history of watching World Cup matches, but I could see early on there were a lot more yellow and red cards being thrown. I understand now that the total number of yellow and red cards thrown in this tournament had exceeded the total thrown in the 2002 tournament before the end of group play! That’s just crazy. The USA/Italy match, where most of the second half was played with the USA down two players and Italy down one, wasn’t even the worst. This sort of thing, where a referee is quick to throw a card on a foul that’s really not that serious, in my mind encourages the sort of theatrics by tackled players that bring the whole game into disrepute among more casual viewers.
It hasn’t all been that bad, thankfully. One of the last matches we’ve seen so far (the quarterfinals are on the PVR, just waiting for us), Italy vs. Spain, was a great exception. The first yellow wasn’t thrown until the 67th minute, and only two more followed. Bravo!