You might recall that on the last match day of the group stage they put the Leverkusen-Barça dead rubber on FS1 while Olympiacos-Arsenal was on FS2. They have a strict set of priorities that they appear not to deviate from. It looks like Barça comes first and any English team comes second, so if they are both in the same game then it's an obvious choice for them, actual competitiveness of the tie be damned.
FYI I head that (despite guide data to the contrary), for the late Europa League games tomorrow, they'll have Multimatch on FS2 and Spurs-Dortmund on FS Plus.
Agree with your overall point, but Leverkusen v Barca was not a dead rubber game. Not for Leverkusen at least.
That's true because it turned out that Roma couldn't defeat BATE in Rome but when the decision was made to show the Barça game over Arsenal, Leverkusen's chances of advancing were minuscule and in a way depended more on another game than their own. Kind of more of an argument to show Roma-BATE (not that I'm suggesting that was ever a possibility). So yeah it wasn't a 100% dead rubber, but there was a 100% chance that Barça would win the group and a 90% chance that Roma would be second. And the fact that it wasn't a dead rubber for Leverkusen actually played no part in the decision. Apparently during a prior match day, they'd put Arsenal on FS1 and Barça on FS2 and Barça had either almost matched or exceeded Arsenal's rating (never mind that this was for a game that was relevant to Barça advancing), so that's why they picked Barça for FS1 on the final match day, despite (as we know) Arsenal playing a "final" in which it needed a 2 goal victory away to advance.
If you are Alexi Lalas and you are in the booth for your expertise, after watching the replay of the most important play of the game for the 6th time, you think he would have an opinion if it was a foul or not. Tell me. Don't ask play by play guy. Edit: they showed the replay 7th time and zoomed in forcing him to declare. Aleluia.
That's interesting, but it doesn't have to do with the topic title of Fox Soccer being stupid. Should we make an "Americans involved in sports media" stupidity thread? We have something like that in the Soccer in the USA forum.
Have watched 3-4 matches of Copa Centenario so far. Don't know if all of this can be blamed on FOX but: 1) During anthems of ARG-CHI, they started with the sequential closeups of CHI players before the ARG anthem was finished. 2) During COL-PAR when COL scored they showed 3 guys in the front row jumping up and down, but they has USA & MEX shirts on! 3) The PBP guy (Justin Kusher?) who's been working the Rose Bowl seems a bit of a soccer noob... on the first game he called the other day, he literally said "there's a flag on the play" when the ref pulled out a yellow card. On the flip side, Hercules Gomez is the latest analyst they've brought into the studio, and I think he's been pretty good.
This guy Justin Kusher is pretty bad. Maybe not quite as bad as GuJo but there is an echo of him. Columbia just clearly had a goal quickly called off for offsides, but Justin was clueless about that, calling it a goal, even when the ball was quickly put back in play by Paraguay from inside their own box where the offside occurred. If he doesn't get better soon, let's hope they put him out to pasture before WC'18. Edit: And he did it again! Saying "the flag comes out" when the ref brandished his card. Yikes.
I've completely given up on Fox. I can't even tolerate a minute of it now. If it's a Fox match, I look for streams from other broadcasts. For the CopaAmCent I've found a decent broadcast. I have no idea where it's from (they don't tell you), but it's a single English play-by-play guy. He's quite good. He actually knows the players a bit and best of all knows the game. He knows what's going on and gets excited at the right moments.
Yeah the flag comment says it all. Its not something you can get wrong if you know more than 5% of what there is to know about soccer. Even GuJo was above that threshold. Is it too early to begin planning a trip to get out of this country for 2018 World cup?
Well that may be but he's NOT very good calling soccer. Maybe he needs to go back to "announcing Minor League Soccer". Then maybe a few years later he's worth another try on the big stage. Actually I'd bet with his apparent penchant for working on so many sports, that he will never acquire the knowledge or insight required to work a major soccer tournament. That said, I won't be too surprised if Fox Sports don't have him penciled in for WC'18.
I'd really like to know what Fox is thinking with these presenters. It seems like anybody else would have learned from the GuJo experiment, but Fox doubles down instead. I don't get it. What's the goal?
I have a feeling FOX will just take the FIFA World Feed for most of the 2018 World Cup matches and just have the American guys in the studio do mostly USA and maybe Mexico matches. Maybe some other regional Countries. That is my two cents.
Maybe he's trying to trademark his here comes the flag call like some other announcers. Two that come to mind are "It's in the net"-DC united guy and "You can put it on the board." -White Sox guy. But after awhile, those get annoying. From the impressions here, it's not funny even the first time.
And a difference is that those 2 examples are at least factually correct - when a guy hits a home run if gets reflected on the scoreboard. When DC scores a goal, the announcer doesn't say "Its in the lake". Whereas a soccer ref doesn't actually carry 2 differently coloured flags in his pocket. Okay, I'm done being Captain Obvious for the day.
Yeah, calling a card a 'flag' just makes you sound ignorant about the game. I think that's part of what is so irritating about these announcers that are used to calling multiple sports -- they mix and match terminology between sports so much, it just highlights the fact that these guys are dilettantes at best. Also, I wonder if they are (consciously or not) trying to homogenize the various styles into one sort of generic American sportscasting vocabulary. For example, does anyone call baseball shoes 'spikes' anymore? It's been genericized into 'cleats' like gridiron football. Likewise, 'touchline' and 'byline' in soccer gets changed to 'sideline' and 'endline'. That doesn't rankle as much as actual ignorance of the game, but it doesn't help.
Hawk Harrelson is the most annoying commentator I have ever heard... just another reason to be a Cubbies fan.
This whole Copa has felt fairly bush league. Empty seats, lack of atmosphere, crap matches (mostly), poor Fox presentation. And yeah, that Justin Kutcher guy is just about the worst part of the Fox broadcasts and that's saying something. We've been spoiled by NBC's coverage of the EPL and Fox's using of the English language pool CL commentators. Give me the dulcet tones of Martin Tyler any day over this.
I like the Hawk's home run calls. More annoying IMO are the National's 'see you later' and the Giants 'it is outta here'. (I'm not much into MLB but I do watch "Quick Pitch" every night) At least the english language soccer announcers try to come up with different calls for goals rather than trotting out the same thing every time like the baseball guys. After all no 2 goals are alike
You are most likely watching 'PremierSports' from the UK. Decided to watch the Brazil v Haiti match on Premier using my iptv service. Single announcer and I must say - very knowledgeable. Didn't catch his name... SA www.soccertvblog.com