Saturday, June 10, 2006

Annoying WC coverage

A rant

So I am at work following the Germany - Costa Rica game online. Six goals are scored, two of them absolute crackers according to the text commentary at BBC. As soon as the game finishes I immediately head home to catch highlights and hopefully even a short post-match analysis. But, no! The first thing that the jackasses broadcasting the WC here want to talk about is the US soccer (no damn it, its football) team, its world cup performances historically, how they played in the last cup, their percentage of wins there, their star players, their opponents, their team colours, father's birthdays, pet peeves, favorite songs and every rot imaginable! This goes on for an atrocious half-hour right after the game before they finally condescend to show me 30 seconds of highlights from the Germany game!

Alright, I get it! No US men's national team does well at the international stage, not baseball, basketball, ice-hockey or any such thing. SO, ok, it is a reasonably big deal that they've made it here. And they are a pretty good team too, in my opinion, entertaining, good offence etc. But do you have to go on yapping about it? Their first game is on Monday, talk about it then or on Sunday night, not after every game, especially without showing highlights first!

Then there was today's England - Paraguay game on ABC. Being an England fan, I had gotten up reasonably early for a Saturday to watch it. About 15 - 20 mins before the game, I turn on the TV looking for the buildup, the singing of the anthems, the fans roaring in anticipation, the players in the tunnel, waiting to run on to the field. But, no! ABC, not being a regular sports broadcaster, would rather treat this match as an inconvenient intruder into its weekend TV shows. So, they start coverage only from the kickoff, not a second earlier! And to top it all, I was forced to watch the channel's fluffy early morning news show which covered, among other things, and I swear I'm not making this up, a donkey born on 6-6-6!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Are you friggin' kidding me?????

7 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

donkey born on 6-6-6 ..freaking hilarious!!U really should see the espn coverage..hopefully u wud when u come down here..its got harsha bhogle anchoring with 2 other english chaps..its tres brilliante.!!Its so awesome to watch world cup football for once other than on DD.!

Sumant

3:28 AM  
Blogger Santosh Sankar said...

Man, I wanted to throw the remote at the TV when that donkey thing came on!!! But yes, I'm seriously looking forward to the ESPN coverage; British commentators are the best when it comes to football!

10:12 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Anything British almost always exudes a viewer confidence. Maybe its the tight lipped accent, even if a Brit said "The moon is brighter than the sun", you probably would believe it for a second. :) Inherently intellectual.

~ananth

7:48 PM  
Blogger Santosh Sankar said...

Completely true! They did create the English language after all!!

8:34 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It is a real struggle to find any good objective coverage on anything at all these days (may be except the voodooed Ass born on 6/6/6!). But I thought the coverage on ESPN was acceptable. But believe me, I watched most of the matches on a dratted local spanish channel with a lot of rrrrotten commentarrry!!!!

Yellow journalism...down down!

10:41 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Forgot to sign off in my previous comment :)

--Chithi

10:42 AM  
Blogger Santosh Sankar said...

Why don't you get ESPN? It's not that bad but we get only an American perspective on everything (and like I said after each game instead of doing an analysis they talked about the US football team). When a game gets boring the commentators start talking about the Americsn football team. Every panelist is an American who really don't have too much international experience to make an incisive analysis of the game beyond saying stuff like, "I thought he played well" and "They didn't have any momentum going!"

5:49 PM  

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