It hurts me to write this.
It feels wrong.
I don’t consider myself to be that typical annoying American sports fan.
I do try to be as open as I can to watching
the other popular sports around the world, but with international TV for the
past nine months I’ve definitely had to adjust a little bit.
And by a little, I mean a lot!
Wow.
Cricket
has to be the most boring game I’ve ever watched in my life, and I know that
people say the same thing about baseball, but c’mon!
Even if I concede the point to some of my friends who claim that it is
an amazing and interesting game, I find it to be one of the most
unwatchable sports I’ve ever encountered.
Rugby seems like it would be incredibly
fun to watch, and is, but it’s rarely broadcast even in international waters, and Curling and Netball are complete mysteries.
But of course dominating my European and Caribbean ESPN
channels this year, has been the world’s most popular game, football.
I’ve known this sport my entire life, as almost everyone on
earth has.
Its rules are simple,
pure, and maddeningly so at times because at the pro level, so often the score
ends up to be much ado about nothing.
I can appreciate a good match, as I’ve written before, even in a
nil-nil draw.
I can appreciate the
incredible skill of these players, the offensive and defensive battle, and good
spacing and great passing, but after nine months of having this stuff jammed down my throat, I
have a few opinions. Believe me, I hate to write this, but there are a few
fatal flaws here.
I’m going to
combine all of the leagues that I’ve been watching this year; Premiership,
LaLiga, Bundesliga, Eredivisi, UEFA Europa (and even ulp, the MLS) but I want
to focus for a minute on the World Cup qualifiers, because they are happening
right now and are ultimately by far, the matches of most consequence.
The World Cup is the greatest of all the sports tournaments,
with the hopes and wills of entire nations seemingly dwindling on a scale.
Up and down, up and down they go, and even
to an absurd level, as was so horrendously and recklessly reported last month, regarding
Mexico’s qualifying matchup, so do whole economies; One billion
dollars apparently riding on one game?
(Well technically two games, with the aggregate goal totals being the
deciding factor
. So basically, two 90 minute halves.) Maybe in some
configurations of economic calculations, those numbers might be close to
accurate, but still, what an absurd and reckless thing to report on ESPN!
It’s not as if corruption is unheard of
in sports, and I can only imagine what’s possible with a billion dollars on the
line. And those in control of the match have absolute control. And this coming summer in the great country of Brazil we are once again, going to see if it works out for the best, or for the worst.
Which brings me to my point. As much as we are supposed to love and celebrate these World
Cup qualifiers, there are some real problems from a broadcasting perspective.
1.) The pitch is so big that we are always stuck with the
extreme wide shot in live time, only getting close up looks after near misses
and flops. My kingdom for these
guys to follow the NFL’s lead and put some cameras on wires to give us a new
perspective. That would be amazing
wouldn’t it? It has to be
somewhere in that massive budget!
2.) The poor announcers feel like they have to hype up the
commentary as if the whole world is going to explode, when a goal is even only somewhat
close to being scored. But then of course it almost always
isn’t. And then…
3. After said
goal isn’t scored, we immediately get
the close up of the player looking frustrated, embarrassed, often times like a
bad actor, they give the George Costanza “who farted” face. But the worst part is...
4. The majority of close-ups that we do get are of the players when they try to sell a penalty call to the referee, by flailing dramatically, or
going down to the pitch like they’ve been shot after being grazed incidentally.
Hands covering face, writhing on
the ground waiting for the yellow or red card to come out. This is done shamelessly on countless
occasions, because it works. Referees are tricked all the time, it
reminds me of cheesy professional wrestling! Now I know that this is a rough game and that there is real contact out there (we all remember
the pain of shin on shin crime,) but the cameras don’t lie, and over and over
again we are forced to witness the obvious pretenders. While the referees play the dopes.
So what happens next?
The announcers spend the next few minutes talking about how the call was
wrong, and how the team got robbed by said call, but nothing is ever done to
fix the wrong. This is a big
problem, because it happens over and over again. And yes, there are missed calls in other sports too, but
rarely in a sport where 1-0 is an extremely realistic outcome. A call or non-call in the penalty box
is very often the difference in the game!
90 minutes reduced to a one second penalty shot, which nearly always
results in a goal. And that brings
us to our one major problem with this
World Cup thing…
5. One referee is God. That’s it, that’s the problem. There is one man on the field who
decides every crucial aspect of the match with impunity, and it just makes no
sense these days. There could so easily
be a few eyes in the sky that could overturn calls in obvious cases, and no one
would be less served by it. And it
wouldn’t have to slow things down either.
It would enhance the product actually, so why hasn’t it been done? If we wanted to watch one guy decide on
his own, who wins or loses a championship game, why don’t we just watch him play
a video game against himself, or role a dice. It’s absurd. Diego
Maradona won the 1986 World Cup for Argentina by using his arm instead of his
head on a header goal, and that is a lasting image for all time. But Argentina is still the 1986 World
Cup Champion. Not addressing the
egregious bad/non-calls is a disservice to the game. It doesn’t preserve anything, in fact it actually exposes
the games major weakness. Why? Why not make a change?
With whole countries riding on these results, we can't have frivolous, subjective calls dictating history. Of course it is a near-impossible job to referee a match well, and these guys are extremely talented, but there has to be safe-guards. Why aren't they in place for the world's most important sports tournament? The table is now set for the summer in Brazil. There's still time to get this right.
C'mon powers that be! The World Deserves it.
Just my two Euro,
Thanks for reading,
Underdogs Out!
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