Shep Messing Must Die! and Scattered Thoughts From Weekend One

Scattered Thoughts From Weekend One

• Does it make me a bad person if I was wishing that Shep Messing, one of the U.S. commentators for the Argentina vs. Ivory Coast match, would spontaneously combust as early as the third minute? By minute 30 I was willing to pull a Van Gogh, but remained just rational enough to realize that even if I did it, I could still hear him! This was absolutely the most painful football commentator moment of my life.



• Thank God for Tommy Smyth.

  You see, one of the problems with being a young footballing nation is that the available pool of former players to hire as announcers is relatively small, so regardless of how hard you search, you invariably seem to end up with a few turds in the pool at the World Cup, especially at color commentator. John Harkes is actually decent, Marcelo Balboa is merely dumb, and Eric Wynalda, even though he's only in the studio, is almost too painful to watch, what with that giant ego balloon floating behind him on camera. But nothing compares to Messing, a former goalkeeper for the New York Cosmos, who feels it's his job to defile the sport at every available point in the game by supposedly giving your neophyte football fan a connection to football. The number of references and comparisons to how football is like some other American sport [baseball, basketball, NASCAR, cricket, rugby, etc ad nauseum]was too high to count by the time Saviola scored his goal, and we were only a third of the way through the game. Impossible to drone out, his commentary was made all the worse by the fact that I actually rewatched this freaking game so I could stat it (that stats article will be published here later today). I haven't put much research into this, but Messing might just be the dumbest graduate of Harvard ever to be on television. Where's Martin Tyler when you desperately, desperately need him? Thank God for Tommy Smyth.


• Speaking of non-British football coverage, who the hell forgot to send the television graphics people the memo that order and position on the screen matter when publishing the lineups for the game. Every single game I have seen so far has had defenders and wingers scattered willy-nilly on the screen with no regard whatsoever to where they are actually playing on the field. Just because these guys all have "D" or "M" next to their names for their position doesn't mean you can throw their pictures on the screen wherever you want to. Central defenders and midfielders go in the middle... full backs and wingers go on the out side.
  
  And you wonder why football has a hard time catching on in America...




• "Le Toupee" has yet to play in the World Cup.

  The announcers in the Iran vs. Mexico match were not terrible, and actually managed to provide two fantastic tidbits of information that I never would have known otherwise. Did you know that one of Iran's players is nicknamed "The Helicopter" for his prowess in the air? Even better, one of Iran's midfielders is nicknamed "The Carpet" due to his ability to "glide by defenders like he was riding a flying carpet from Arab mythology." Are you kidding me? The CARPET?!? This has to be the greatest bad nickname of all time, and has inspired me to add terrible nicknames to whomever I feel like for the rest of the Cup. I mean, obviously nothing I could possibly come up with will hold a candle to The Carpet, but typing Michael "Runaway" Owen or Zinedine "Le Toupee" Zidane will at least keep my spirits up. Maybe if I create enough terrible nicknames, I can get a job as a press agent with the Iranian National team.


• Can you imagine what Peter Crouch would look like in the box with 20 more pounds of muscle on him? Why haven't his teams hired a full-time strength coach and dietician in order to make this happen?


• Is it now a Pavlovian response ingrained into every footballer that they should raise their arm as soon as the other team scores a goal and hope the assistant referee raises his flag for offsides? Perhaps the arm raise means something completely different like, "Yep, we really suck," or is the universal football signal for, "Hi mom." These are things you start to wonder after having watched 8 matches in two days.


• Just an FYI - I have to travel to South Carolina for an event this weekend, so blog updates on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday may be a little sparse. I'll try and make up for it when I get home.