I agree. Ballack was getting visibly annoyed with him today as they were discussing the England / France game. Lalas was positively giddy about the English performance (?) and Ballack was unimpressed (rightfully, IMO) by the team.
Oops. Forgot about that. Well, good on Lampard to pick up the injury!
Benzema has such a great shot. Too bad for France that he couldn’t get one to go. Hart has some butterfingers right now, but generally was good. England were alright, pretty much what everyone expected, I’m sure.
Lalas is horrible. Ballack has to be thinking, “What the hell am I doing here?” One ridiculous thing Lalas did yesterday with Rossi was come out and ask, “Who do you think is better, Balotelli or Cassano?” What a prick. Rossi still has a future with Italy and will play with at least 1 of the 2. Yeah, put him on the spot, Alexi, to make your self feel better about your rant.
Can’t wait for Poland-Russia tomorrow. I expect Russia to have their way, especially with Szczesny out. But, you never know with the hosts, right?
I don’t know how British football commentators rank overall. I only speak English, so I can’t evaluate Spanish or Italian commentators or whatever. But yes, between American and UK commentators, I find the Americans generally brutal. They are less insightful about what’s going on and less knowledgeable about players and strategy. “Why don’t they just put it in the box and see what happens?” was Kasey Keller’s grand analysis of why Germany was failing to score.
Of course, Mario Gomez chose pretty much that exact second to head in Sami Khedira’s cross (which he put in the box!) which probably made Kasey feel like a genius. :rolleyes:
Kasey Keller is almost as bad as Marcelo Balboa. Ballack is no better than Lalas.
I can’t remember which game it was on Sunday, when the announcer on ESPN criticized someone for missing a header, along the lines of “they really need to be trying to put a shot on goal”. Oh, really? Maybe someone should tell the players about this remarkable insight.. if only they’d known the right strategy was to try and get the ball at the goal, then they wouldn’t have missed the header! (And of course, a few minutes later, the same side connected on a header. Maybe they did listen to the announcer :dubious:).
This was a U.S. channel, but I think it was the English-accented announcer; I don’t know what that says about the relative merits of English versus U.S. announcers.
That was basically Keller’s analysis of Sweden’s performance, too.
As someone who watches a lot of English soccer, you get the same inanity from those guys as well. “Got to put that on target”, “a bit hopeful there”, “really need to pull one back here” - same old shit. Every now and then you get some meaningful in-game analysis… but it’s rare enough to be noteworthy.
I think pissing on the announcers (and post-match commentators) is a world-wide tradition.
As to this tournament… games during the work-day are killing me. I don’t think I’ve seen more than an hour of any single match. Hopefully I can catch a few over the weekend.
I wrote down the comment on the French goal above, re Parker and Gerrard’s positioning, immediately after seeing the replay. 10 mins later during the half-time “analysis” the exact point I was making was repeated by ITV’s pundits.
This is not to say I am some sort of genius - more to point out how mediocre pundits are. A good pundit will add to my understanding of the game, if they’re just seeing something on screen and pointing out the obvious, they’re not doing much of a job - anyone can do that, as I proved with that comment. If you can’t rise above the level of insight a moderately informed viewer can provide, you should fuck off and find another job. Unfortunately, most pundits fall into the “he’s got to hit the target from there” school; the worst ones though are those who make a pronouncement and refuse to change their minds about what they’ve said, even if the slo-mo replay proves them conclusively incorrect. There’s more than a few of those in the English game.
Wow - Czechs up to 2-0 in the first six minutes! Do toho! Do toho!
Very true unfortunately.
The phrase that makes me want to slap 'em (and Robbie Savage in particular…but then hey, who needs a reason for that?) is “the ref’s got to get those important decisions right”…what? as if the importance of the decision has any bearing on how likely or not the ref is to get it right.
Or “he’s got to see that!” what on earth does that mean? Unless you are seeing the game through his eyes you haven’t got a clue what he should or shouldn’t be seeing.
Simplistic, myopic inanities most of the time. Which is why the better commentators stand out I suspect. (incidentally, someone I always find quite informative on Radio 5 is ex-Leeds defensive stalwart Danny Mills, not everyone’s cup of tea as a player but one of the more bearable ex-pro pundits)
It’s only a minor thing but I really hate it when a ball hits the post/crossbar and the commentators keep saying the player was unlucky. He wasn’t unlucky, he was inaccurate…
I think that’s why I used to like Jonathan Pearce so much as a commentator - when he first came on the scene, for Channel 5, he wasn’t any more perceptive than any other commentator, but he made the game exciting with his style. Since then he has toned it down into more of a “Motson-lite” - unfortunately Motson seems to be the one they all want to emulate, and IMHO Motson is pretty bad - useless and inane stats, sometimes not quite keeping up with play. I would still rather hear him over Clive Tyldesley, though. Unfortunately I don’t have Sky so I rarely get to hear the best and worst they have to offer.
I always liked how Motty pronounced Nedved’s name right (and made a point of doing so), but made a hash out of all the other Czech players. I watch the BBC MOTD and halftimes sometimes - no commercials - and haven’t been able to figure out why they keep paying Alan Shearer to say the most obvious things… or maybe he just shows up everyday and nobody has the heart to tell him he’s not needed let’s just pull up an extra chair.
That’s not fair. Without Alan Shearer’s input, how would we know that Alan Shearer would have easily scored all those chances that the strikers missed? 
I love watching Russia play any team (in any sport) from the Eastern Bloc. Very hard played games with a lot of emotion.
Oh, and every time Chris Waddle says “pelanty” I’m going to kill a kitten. The dozy mackem twat can’t even pronounce the word so no wonder he blazed one over in 1990.
The current game again shows that this is wrong with regards to Poland. The Poles have a very nice offensive record and their best players (like Lewandowski) are attackers or attacking midfielders. Save for the goalies, though, their defense is rather poor.
I was happy to be proven wrong, watching as a neutral I like to see good attacking play, and dodgy defending. It’s harder to appreciate good defensive play when it’s not your team.
(Btw, Poland came into this tournament having conceded 1 goal in 6 matches, and Greece scored fewer goals than any team that qualified. It wasn’t much of a prediction on my part, I hadn’t seen either team actually play for some time.)
Eh, I think that’s an arguable point. Even absolute world class athletes who have more skill than anyone else don’t have (and never could have) truly pinpoint control. It’s probably a bit easier to think about it in basketball. Michael Jordan is going to make some percentage of shots from 3-point range. It’s a lot more than you or I (or most professional basketball players) will make, but it’s not 100%. And Michael Jordan more than most people has the ability to get himself into a position where he can take an open shot, and has the nerve to be able to make that shot with 0.1 seconds left on the clock. And yet he’s STILL going to miss it some percent of the time. Now, it’s obviously a bit weird feeling to say he “got unlucky” when he misses, as it’s basically 100% pure skill, but if, at the absolute limit of human skill, one can only make that shot 80% of the time, and this happens to be one of the 20% when he misses…
Just over 3 hours till kick off… I feel sick.