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 Watching
the undefeated and league leading New England Revolution play
their arch-enemy New York Metro Stars. The scene on the field in New
York is brilliant sunshine and the fans are all in T-shirts and shorts,
whereas when we look out the window here in Boston it is dark and dreary,
cold and nearly night-time.
Supposedly the game is live, but it is hard to believe, and incongruities
like this are what make us doubt the reality of a lot of what they are
showing us on
TV
these days.
Meanwhile, as part of the plot to popularize the world’s number one
sport among the athletic barbarians here in the homeland, the network
announcers keep presenting, with attractive animated graphics, newly invented
statistical categories like "passes for possession" and "passes behind
the defense".
They are obviously trying to pander to a perceived American predilection
for numbers, statistics, objective measurement of performance. It won’t
work. Soccer is too fluid, too subjective, too creative to be reduced
to statistics. In Europe and South America sports writers and pundits give
grades to each player after every game, B+ or C- for this guy or that,
but this is a subjective analysis as well.
American networks who want to help soccer catch on would be better advised
to use their technological wizardry to better capture the magic on the
field; more camera angles, super-slo-mo so we can actually see the footwork
and body control necessary for those incredible moves, movable cameras
suspended over the field like FOX NFL broadcasts to capture the dynamic
sweep of
a wave
of attackers racing downfield or a perfectly timed offside trap.
Forget the numbers and graphics. Show us the game, just better.
postscript: Revs
2 – Metro Stars 2; Revs still undefeated.
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