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By Kevin Wilkerson, PubClub.com Sports Blogger
What in tarnation is going on over there?
A bunch of players in unidentifiable uniforms are running up and down a field (the “pitch” in the sport’s lingo) kicking a ball seemingly everywhere except toward the net.
Soccer is a strange sport to most Americans and watching the World Cup is completely confusing. Fox (I am intentionally not putting it in all caps) isn’t helping, either, with its coverage of the games.
For starters, I never know which team is which – they don’t have their country’s name in big letters on their uniforms and often don’t even wear the colors of their country’s flag. Fox could help this situation by putting that on the screen such as “USA in white.”
The announcers make no sense to the average American audience. First of all they are hard to understand with their accents – why doesn’t Fox use American broadcasters? – and they are barely audible anyway above the crowd noise, which is probably a good thing.
The studio announcers are hardly better. Landon Donovan and Alexi Lalas are former American soccer World Cup players that even the most casual sports fans knows about, and it’s natural to want to lean on them for insightful comments. If they have made any, I have missed them.
It would be nice if they would start out by explaining the rules. For example, in the round of 16 when Morocco and Spain completed their 95-minute sprints up and down the field in a scoreless tie, I was expecting either Donovan or Lalas to tell the audience what happens next. They didn’t; they went straight into some talk about what didn’t happen on the field and I had to go to Google to learn there are two 15-minute sudden-death periods followed by a shootout if necessary.
From the moment the World Cup started, the broadcasters seemed to think the American audience knows everything about soccer so they don’t bother to explain anything. They must feel as if we know the players like we do on our favorite football team. Listen Fox, we know nothing. So please tell us.
I don’t understand the game clock at all, and I doubt I’m alone on this one. It counts up instead of down and with the “extra time” you never really know when the game going to end. Why don’t they just stop the clock? When the clock goes beyond the “extra minutes” then the players continue to play and then suddenly, the game stops.
The announcers treat this as casually as a goalie kick to midfield but it makes no sense to us once-every-four-year soccer watchers in America. It would be nice if the broadcasters at least tried to explain it or at least tell us why play is continuing after the extra minutes have been played.
They also don’t even mention how ridiculous the flopping is in the World Cup. That should be a 15-yard penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen a player go down, grabbing his leg – with Fox cameras zooming in on an agonizing-looking face – only to have the player pop up and run to his position the second the ball is put back into play.
Finally, being a basketball and football aficionado, it drives me nuts that players pass all the time – often right into the teeth of the defense – and hardly ever kick the ball toward the goal.
My soccer friends tell me I don’t understand the nuances of the game. Perhaps not, but passing the ball backward, kicking into a crowd of defenders and being unable to execute a simple basketball-style fast break – the USA had a four-on-three in one game and were running so close to each other I’m almost surprised they didn’t trip over each other – makes no sense to me.
It must be noted that I say the same things about hockey, too.
Plus, there’s no beer at World Cup 2022. That is another foreign concept to Americans – and a lot people in other countries, too.
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