Of course, I spent so much time focusing on that one project over the last three months, that a ton of other projects piled up behind it.

And as if I needed any more things to distract me, something really important and non-negotiable in nature sneaked up on me – The World Cup.

I recognize that most of my readers have little care for The Beautiful Game – feel free to skip the rest of this entry. I’ve been so neglectful a blogger recently that I deserve to be ignored when I finally find something I deem worth spending time on writing up.

Actually, it is a bit too early for any strong impressions of this Cup – 12 of the 32 teams are yet to take field for their opening games. I have to say that I am slightly disappointed by the quality of football that I’ve seen so far, but no major surprised have occurred, a few title favorites that have already played confirmed their claims, a few weaker teams were exposed as prime candidates for group stage elimination.

What I am mostly incredulous about is the quality of commentary and analysis on ESPN/ABC. I suppose I should not be complaining overall, with every single game available on prime channels live in magnificent HD. Furthermore, with British Sky network apparently not getting any broadcast rights for the Cup, ESPN/ABC hired several Sky commentators and talking heads to spice up the proceedings. I happened to like a number of those guys while I was a Sky subscriber.

Here in the States, they show immediate signs of degradation. Led by ESPN anchors who are all in love with the sound of their voice and can never condone asking a question that does not have several sub-questions and not take three time as long to ask as to answer, all of these commentators slide into meaningless platitudes, cliches and occasional sweeping over-dramatizations. They spend more time reminding the viewer of the upcoming coverage (ending each such reminder with the inane tagline: “Remember, one game changes everything!” – WTF?) than actually commentating. They try to sensationalize things as much as they can at the expense of the game analysis.

And what about those slo-mo close-ups of footballers’ grimacing faces every couple of minutes? Must be the next bright idea someone had about making football more appealing to an average American viewer: Inject emotions into the broadcast! Hey, this is not golf. You want to fill the pause in proceedings, show me a replay of the last key moment in the game, rather than what the broadcast director feels is the example of the players “feeling it”.

And the information graphics that comes up on the screen a la baseball stats is sometimes simply laughable. Every other fact is bound to be incorrect, from Holland listed as getting 4th place as their best result to-date (in fact, it was a runner-up not once but twice) to the names of clubs to which players belong misspelled or probably invented (how one misspells “Alaniya” to get “Kublan” for one Nigerian midfielder who plies his trade in Russia is beyond me).

It all looks so amateurish it is not even funny.

Reminds me of the Soviet TV coverage of the 1990 World Cup. Then, as one star player from each country would give a short immediate postgame interview, somebody in the TV hierarchy decided that it would be a grand idea to include those interviews in the broadcasts. The interviews were conducted in each player’s native language. For whatever reason, nobody cared to actually hire proper interpreters. Instead, the live sound stream would be sufficiently diminished to make the actual words coming out in Spanish, Italian, German, French, Portuguese, etc, practically indecipherable, overlaid with a bright young voice sounding as if it was translating.

One small problem. Football players have a habit of exchanging jerseys after completion of important matches. Hygienic considerations notwithstanding, a fair number of players would put the opponent’s jersey on when exiting the pitch – I suppose they want to keep their hands free for whatever reasons. So, an Uruguayan player puts on a jersey he obtained from his Italian opponent before coming on for his interview. Italy won 2-0. The behind-the-screen “interpreter” works off the sight of an Italian jersey and proceeds to talk about “elation”, “hard-won battles”, “scoring when we needed to”, “giving credit to the tough Uruguayan team”, etc… But anyone who’s just seen the game knows that the player in front of the camera is actually Uruguayan, and he is probably talking about “disappointment”, “missed chances”, “mistakes in defense”, “bad refereeing decisions”, “giving credit to the deserving Italians”… It was such a blatant attempt to deceive the viewers, exposed in such a simple but spectacular fashion. Every time I see an attempt at broadcast sophistication where incompetence is brightly shining through, I think back to that.

Just as with the Olympics, I have little choice in the matter. I want to watch – I’ll have to do my best to tolerate.

A single Olympiad occurred during my time in Europe and, having watched it in two different countries, I was impressed with the coverage both on BBC and also on Italian TV. It was much closer to what I remember from my Soviet days, when during the Olympics, practically every event could be seen on TV in its entirety, either live or earlier recorded, with the focus on the present competition.

Now, NBC has done its darnedest best to prove its uniquely inept approach to covering the Games.

Listen, NBC! I don’t need to hear for the fifth time in a couple of days that a Canadian skier draws inspiration from his severely-handicapped brother, or that his Australian rival is actually a Canadian born in Vancouver who bolted Down Under because of a conflict with Canadian team authorities, or that Chinese figure skating favorites have given 18 years of their lives to their pursuit of a gold medal. I already heard and saw that all on the last night’s broadcast! It is no longer enlightening if you keep repeating it. And it is not even news anymore if you simply re-cut the same video segment differently.

Least of all do I need two minutes of commercial breaks for each four-five minutes of event coverage. Especially when there’s been no athletic performances shown in the last 5-minute segment.

In the three hours of prime-time Olympic coverage that I watched last night, we’ve seen about ten downhill runs, a handful of snowboard cross heats and half a dozen or so figure skating pairs’ programs. With charitable approximation, that’s about 70 minutes of the actual event coverage out of 180 minutes spent in front of the TV. Ridiculous!

Some scheduling decisions are impossible to understand, period. I realize that with the 3-hour difference, some prime-time events are simply occurring too late for the younger kids to stay up and watch, but why would the broadcast of a final of a day-time event be pushed all the way back towards midnight? Kimmy was rather fascinated by snowboard cross, but only quarterfinal runs were shown before her bedtime. Semifinals were slotted in between figure skating performances around 10pm, and even I did not stay up beyond 11pm to see the final run. On the other hand, in one of those prime-time segments, we were treated to a riveting spectacle of a Chinese figure skater throwing a football at the beginning of his warm-ups. Followed by the drawn-out medal ceremony for the aforementioned Canadian skier.

Is there anybody out there who enjoys watching the coverage of one of the biggest sporting events on the calendar with the actual competition taking backseat to fluff? NBC has been at it for as long as I can remember. I suppose exclusive broadcast rights mean that my only alternative is not to watch Olympics at all, and since I do want to watch, I will unwillingly contribute to the ratings that will continue to fool NBC into thinking that their coverage was successful. If only I could move back to London for the couple of these Olympic weeks.

The Superbowl now holds decidedly limited interest for me: Not having seen it on the American TV for several years, I’m curious as to the commercials aspect of it. Colts in a shootout, anyway.

In other news, Cablevision and Scripps Networks have resolved their dispute regarding Food Network and HGTV, and both are back on air. Since these two channels constitute roughly 80% of Natasha’s choice of viewing, she is now back in contention for TV-watching time.

And on an entirely unrelated note, my corporate overlords recently decided to block access to a variety of blogging sites. Stand-alone domains such as mine are still accessible, but services such as Blogger are not anymore. I can still use my RSS aggregator for reading, but my ability to click through has been curtailed, which means however little I commented in the past, there will be even less of that going forward. And it goes almost without saying that I practically never spend time on blog-reading when at home. If they block RSS sites as well, I might drop out of the blogosphere altogether. Advance apologies to all of my pen friends.

I can kinda see their point (just as I can kinda see the point about soccer – football – being a boring game where nothing of consequence may happen at all for long periods of times; the key here, of course, is what you count as being of consequence…). And when they ask me what I see in that game, I say that several things appeal to me: it is a rare team game in which your best player can only have as many attempts at scoring as your ninth-best player (and you cannot send him in to bat at the game’s most crucial moment, unless it is actually his turn); the expectation of something exciting happening on the next play – in simplest terms, a home run, – is greater than similar expectations in other team sports; and the stand-alone individual efforts manifested in the direct one-on-one clash of opposing players in the context of the overall team effort makes it easier to identify with the players you root for.

To say nothing of the feeling that if a big-assed, pot-bellied dude can be a major leaguer, then a reasonably-athletic yours truly could be too. Or, rather, could have been – if not for the obvious handicap of not having grown up in America and not having played the game as a child.

Things that are impossible to quantify, in other words.

Unlike football, though, I can’t really get much into watching baseball when the team I root for does not play. But when the Yankees play well into the postseason, watching them becomes a priority.

The few years that we lived in London, the Yanks ended their seasons in disappointment, bowing out in the first round of the playoffs or missing them altogether. We came back – and suddenly the Yankees are the best team in baseball again, and now only one win away from re-gaining the ultimate glory that eluded them for almost a decade. It has been a pretty interesting postseason too, with everything from brilliant pitching performances to overturned umpiring decisions to a once-in-a-lifetime steal of two bases on a single pitch.

And yet, some things in baseball are just plain weird. Joba Chamberlain entered the game in the 8th inning with one-run lead, which he unluckily gave up, exiting with the score tied. When the Yanks scored 3 more runs in the 9th, Joba ended up as the winning pitcher of record, even though he did not pitch anymore and, in effect, was the only pitcher who made things worse for the team. How exactly does that make sense?

But I don’t know if I don’t feel worse at the thought that the Rays may be wearing the crown in several days’ time. At least, with the Sox, it was a respectably storied franchise that beat – or did better than – my Yankees. But a team who’s never even had a winning record before now possibly winning it all is hard to stomach when balanced against the Yanks’ recent postseason ineptitude.

Well, Philadelphia is practically in New Jersey. Go Phillies, then!

With all due respect to Michael Phelps’s achievement, there is something unfair in the opportunity afforded to the swimmers (as well as gymnasts and runners) to contest multiple events, while most of the sports have a single track available to any given athlete. It is hardly a surprise that career medals lists are dominated by the representatives of those three sports. (Pre-Beijing career lists can be found here).

Check out the names of the Russian gold medalists in Wrestling. Even if you are not entirely familiar with Russian names, you should be able to notice that they are not much different from the names of other medalists from former Soviet republics (look at Men’s 74kg or 60kg, for instance). There is certainly not an ethnic Russian name in sight among the men (at the time of writing). Besides the fact that I find that amusing, it also positions wrestling as the only sport where former Soviet Olympic glories have been maintained with reasonable combined success by representatives of former Soviet republics. Contrast that with gymnastics, in which the combined medal haul of athletes from former Soviet parts was a paltry 4 bronze medals this year – that against the names of Latynina, Andrianov, Dityatin, Nemov, etc. on the career medals list.

Chinese athletes have been tremendously successful in these Games and will likely remain in the top spot for the number of Gold medals won. I find it interesting, though, that the majority of sports in which the Chinese have shown themselves remarkably dominant at these – and in some cases, previous, – Olympics are the ones in which competition is indirect and is decided by posted scores. Gymnastics. Diving. Weightlifting. Shooting. Take any sport in which one needs to outrun, outswim or plainly defeat an opponent in direct confrontation, and the Chinese can often hold their own but are no longer dominant (one exception, apparently, is Badminton). It leads me to think that the Chinese are able to master repeatable skills to perfection, but are much less able to withstand the heat of a direct clash.1

The Olympic medal table, by the way, in Britain – and, according to some people, in most of the non-American word, – lists countries by the number of the Gold medals won, with Silvers and Bronzes providing no more than tie-breakers. That puts too much emphasis on winning, for my taste, contrary to the iconic adage about participation being the main thing. The “American” approach of counting all medals equally sits a bit closer to that ideal, IMHO. Of course, when I mentioned that to a couple of my British acquaintances, I immediately got accused of favoring the system that nudges the two countries that I mostly care for, the US and Russia, ahead of China and the UK, respectively…

Finally, my UCF friend Jeri posted her thoughts on why these Olympics leave a somewhat sour taste. I largely agree with her points.

1 This observation was partially suggested by the material contained in this article (in Russian).

How’s NBC treating American viewers these Games?

It’s not because I’ve always felt it was an irresponsible acquiescence to award the Games to an oppressive regime. (I already vented about it once.) I still feel that way, but I also feel that boycotting the Games, whether from participation standpoint or watching standpoint, is downright pointless.

It’s not because I find watching delayed coverage less exciting than the live one. I do, but it did not keep me away from enjoying Games held in Seoul or Sydney or elsewhere not in my timezone. (And let’s keep aside any discussion about the past atrocious coverages of the various Games by NBC.)

It’s not because I am always a bit conflicted whether to root for the country of my birth or the country that I love. With both of them always among the strongest contenders for the overall athletic supremacy, – as reflected in the medal counts – the mixed feelings are always there, but I truly normally manage to resolve them – by rooting for both, when possible, of course.

It’s simply because Olympics is one sporting event that I always enjoy watching together with Natasha. And for the next two weeks, we are going to be either on our holiday (surely, not much of the TV time is budgeted as part of that) or apart while I stay on my own in London. Some might say that I have a perfect opportunity to veg out in front of the TV – and I will certainly attempt to try it over the weekend – but it’s just not the same for me to watch the Olympics in solitude.

The damn Games are making me feel more lonely!

[upd] I find it a bit spooky that my Olympic rant linked to above was posted on 07/07/07, while this one appeared on 08/08/08. I’m guessing I have to schedule some Olympic-related discussion for September 9th of the next year…

I started following American football in mid-nineties, right around the time that Brett Favre came into his own as one of the best players in the NFL. I liked the way he visibly enjoyed playing, so much so that he quickly became my favorite football player. I’ve always since said that I root for the Green Bay Packers.

But I do have a requisite home team that I root for as well, the New York Jets. And to my utter delight, I learn today that my hands-down favorite player is coming to play for my home team.

Wow! I don’t think this has ever happened to me before. Alex Rodriguez to the Yankees does not really count – that was the best player in the game coming to my home team, rather than my most favorite (despite all of Rodriguez’s personal achievements, he has never merited as much esteem in my eyes as Derek Jeter).

I’m all aflutter (although you hopefully would not notice that by observing me just now).

By the way, Kostyan, sleep easy. I no longer despise the Chicago Bears

The Spanish team was not the only one that went through the tournament unbeaten (the unfortunate Croatians were knocked out in the quarterfinals without having lost a game in the course of play), and they did not manage to win all of their games (they beat Italy on penalties, which is the mechanism to decide who advances, but not who wins the game, IMHO), but they were the only team who was better than the opposition in every game they played. They played fast, skilled and attractive style up and down the field. They beat only one team emphatically – twice! – but don’t let the minimal margins of victory fool you: Only somewhat misplaced generosity with their finishing prevented the Spaniards from running up scores on their other opponents the way they did against Russia.

There was never a doubt of who would win in any of the contests involving Spain. In the final, the Germans had one moment early in the game that failed to develop into a proper chance, and then just one single shot on goal that could have been counted as a half-chance. The Spaniards could have easily scored a handful. In the end, a brilliant pass from Xavi (who clearly earned his “Player of the Tournament” honors with his overall display over the course of the campaign) and a no less brilliant and determined effort from Fernando Torres produced the winning goal that sent Spain to their first major trophy in 44 years.

The Germans were a flawed team, especially on defense, producing a dominating display only in their opening game against the inferior Polish team, and then being worthy of a win only against Portugal in the quarters. But you have to tip your hat to them: Somehow, by the skin of their teeth, Germany seemingly always finds a way to figure among the contenders.

All in all, it was a grand and entertaining tournament. Too bad that it appears unlikely that I’ll have another chance to follow a World Cup or a Euro Championships this closely in the foreseeable future.

On a side note, I watched the final over a plate of fine cheese and wine. A bit unorthodox, I admit, but no less enjoyable.