Deliver Us From Swedish Furniture

US football, sorry Soccer, coverage

I was sitting up the other night, as I have a habit of doing, and found that Channel 5 had the coverage of the MLS, so I thought I would sit around and watch it (this is the reason I can’t let myself get Sky Sports, I would find myself watching something pointless like Getafe vs Osasuna for no reason other than it’s on….) and the thing that struck me the most was not the standard of play, but the coverage…..it was terrible! The director seemed to think that we wanted to zoom in on whoever had the ball….who would then immediately not have the ball….so he’s quickly check, change camera and once again miss the ball. Finally he found the button marked ‘long range view’ and I thought to myself , ‘finally’ when he stuck on a replay of someone making a little drag-back. OK so it’s a nice little bit of skill, but I actually want to watch the game.

I remember this from when I lived over there, I found it really hard to watch American sports coverage. The only game I could muster up any kind of affection for was basketball, but there were so many stops and starts in the game, which the producer would fill with little bits of replays. Now these look very pretty but, if we have to keep stopping, I would much rather find out what is going on, what are the coaches saying, why is so-and-so being subbed? All US sports are geared around TV, so they all have pauses built in, either naturally or forced with time-outs or similar. Soccer (I’ll use this so we don’t confuse our sports!!) does not have this. If you watch the coverage here, the replays are only shown during a natural pause in the game, which are fairly infrequent and really only happen for goals and substitutions (unless you are watching any Italian sides!) The whole flow of the game can only been seen from afar - you need to watch as the right-back sprints down the flank overlapping Beckham to take a defender away and give him the space to send in one of his crosses. You need stand back to appreciate the way Paulo Maldini hardly seems to move during a game, but is always in the right place to make it hard for the opposition to make any headway into their penalty area.

I recently read ‘Once in a Lifetime’ the NY Cosmos book and they pointed out in there that once Pele signed for them, everbody just passed the ball to Pele. This will always make you an easy team to play against as you just man mark him (I remember Lothar Matteus doing the same thing against Maradona and he hardly got a kick in the 1986 World Cup Final) and the Cosmos were not at all good during this period. It wasn’t until they had signed other players that could make team work that Pele could shine. OK, so if you have the likes of Pele, Carlos Alberto, Chinaglia and Beckenbauer in your side then you have to do something pretty spectacular to mess it up, but this is the point - soccer is far more about the balance of your side than it is about the individual superstars. For further proof, just see how well the Real Madrid Galacticos experiment worked….
I’m not sure if this is how it is being coached over in the US as the only experience I have had of American kids playing was when I was last over I met up with my old room-mates nephews who are 15 and 16. I used to play soccer and basketball against them when I lived over there, well when I say play basketball, they were about 11 then and I am 6′2 so all I did was bully them mercilously, and they still beat me. Now they are pushing on towards adulthood, I find it harder to bully them and they have got better….they did let me score once which was nice of them though. Anyway when we played soccer, they both seemed to be obsessed with trying to take the ball past the person in front of them, even when there were much easier passes on. I am hoping that this is actually just them showing off with me and not how they are taught to play, if it is then we could be waiting a lot longer for an American Pele……