AT LEAST we don’t have to listen to JP Dellacamera anymore.
As an England fan, World Cups always have a sense of déjà vu for me. Or perhaps Groundhog Day.
As a nation we seem have this national pathology to either exaggerate our hopes or catastrophize our mistakes. If we put on a strong showing in a group stage game all we suddenly transform into true believers; it’s inevitable that our brave boys will grasp that elusive trophy amid a deafening rendition of “Football’s Coming Home”. Then if, God forbid, we stumble against a team the media deem to be minnows, the team and manager are blasted, lampooned and ridiculed by the media and fans alike.
Fortunately this year our exit was a little different. Harry Kane and co. put on a strong showing against the World Cup champs and for long stretches of the second half looked like the better team. But in the end the Three Lions suffered yet more penalty heartbreak again – of a slightly different variety – but at least this time around nobody is likely to get burned in effigy. We also didn’t have to contend with injury worries to precious metatarsals ahead of time or underhanded foreign villains after the fact (although to be fair, the ref had a bit of a shocker.)
But one thing that remained resolutely the same was the complete awfulness of the US commentators in particular and their coverage in general. The cluelessness of the Fox team is hard to overstate. Alexei Lalas seems to think he is being paid by the decibel, Clint Dempsey issues one incomprehensible non sequitur after another and if Landon Donovan ever had an original thought it would surely die of loneliness.
But proudly sitting atop this pile of incompetence is JP Dellacamera, whose seniority stems not from abilities but rather because he’s been doing it for decades and was the only sap willing to cover this strange foreign sport thirty years ago before the rest of the country caught on.
It also doesn’t help that the format of the US coverage is dictated by commercial interests and subsequent need to fit in as many commercials as possible in pre-game, half time and post game. That means that clips and analysis are whittled down to barely a couple of seconds, which makes in-depth and grown-up analysis impossible. As any true soccer fan will tell you, goals are created by what happens in the 5-10 seconds before the finish. But Fox can’t show you that stuff, because they’ve got an ads for Budweiser, Dodge Ram or State Farm already filling that spot.
Luckily for us, the number of group stages meant that Dellacamera had to share duties with some far more capable commentators, specifically Ian Darke and Derek Rae. But as the tournament progressed and the matches became sequential, rather than simultaneous, it became all Dellacamera, all the time.
Cue my exit. I opted instead for watching Telemundo for a couple of games, because of Andres Cantor’s glorious, florid delivery and his endearing use of Spanglish at key moments. But sadly their half time and post-match analysis is dictated by the same commercial conventions as their American competition. So for the semi finals I finally broke down and bought a VPN which enabled me to watch the BBC’s coverage on iPlayer.
Oh, serenity! This was akin to listening to Beethoven after a non-stop diet of thrash metal. Calm, authoritative, reasoned coverage, in comprehensible English, by analysts who actually knew their stuff. And clips that lasted thirty seconds or more at a time to analyze, for instance, the astounding contribution of Antoine Griezmann to the French semi-final win. So thank you, Messrs Lineker, Shearer, Drogba and Ferdinand for rescuing my World Cup. The very British notion of television owners paying a license fee to fund a non-commercial broadcasting entity does seem hugely eccentric and somewhat antiquated at times, but when the coverage is of an event that really matters – like the World Cup – it all makes glorious sense.
