World Cup Coverage

We’re watching the US coverage of the World Cup (“the WORld Cup”).

Let me just say “Blah blah blah bla-BLAH blah blah”. They cannot shut up. Even after all these years in the country it’s funny the things that surprise you. Watching baseball with the endless jabber and spewing of statistics seems normal, right, even. Watching soccer, which we don’t often, just seems painful.

Now, understand, I never watched much football in the UK but I sort of absorbed it and the coverage style because it was everywhere. So much so, in fact, that although the sound of football chants used to make me wince (oh no, not MORE football), now they make me nostalgic (you don’t get crowd songs like that in US sports on the whole).

But I know enough to know that commentators were terse. They named the guy with the ball, debated the linesmen’s decisions a bit and occasionally went of riffs about a particular player’s current performance.

By five minutes into the first game of the World Cup I knew that the first goal had been scored by the youngest player ever to score the first goal of a world cup at home on his birthday. Wow! (Honestly, though, what are the chances of all of those conditions coming up more than once? A young player of the home team having his birthday on the opening day and scoring the first goal).

They also mentioned that the only goal to have been scored earlier in the match was the one by Scotland against Brazil in 199something. Which is, let’s face it, the last time anyone’s going to mention Scotland in this World Cup.

In case I hadn’t managed to absorb the “correct” commentating style while growing up in the UK, I would have no doubt about it by now, after listening to Kev’s incessant ranting. In the absence of a team he can care about, he is instead raising his blood pressure by yelling at the commentators.

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