Over at Salon, King Kaufman called out ESPN for its handling of today's weather-related technical difficulties during the EURO 2008 semifinal between Germany and Turkey. In this column, Kaufman claimed that ESPN was somehow being dishonest because studio lead Rece Davis never made it clear that Derek Rae and Andy Gray were calling the game from a studio in Bristol, rather than from St. Jakob Park itself, and when the signal went out, the network had no way to describe what was happening.As someone who has watched this competition from the start, I have to ask -- at what point did ESPN not make it perfectly clear that its announcers were all in Bristol?
When Tommy Smyth calls a game, then sits next to Andy Gray at the studio desk 15 minutes later, it should be fairly obvious to everyone what's going on. I recall at several points during the group stage when either Davis or Rob Stone came right out and said that Gray was about to move from the desk to the booth to call the next match.
What's more, this is not unusual for international soccer broadcasts in America. In fact, it's practically standard procedure.
When Max Bretos calls the big Boca Juniors v. River Plate Superclásico for Fox Soccer Channel, he's usually standing in front of a mic and an HDTV somewhere up in Canada. When GolTV's Ray Hudson tells people how much sex there's going to be in Madrid tonight, he's doing so from a studio just outside of Miami. For the most part, these are small TV networks that can't afford to send announcers out to international club matches. The technology allows them to stay at home.
ESPN has made little secret of the fact that they're doing the same thing. For all its glory, EURO 2008 is just mid-afternoon programming for the WWL, and that means cutting costs wherever possible. Bringing Andy Gray to Bristol was a lot cheaper than sending multiple announcing teams to Switzerland and Austria, and it's improved the quality of their soccer coverage. That's reflected in the Nielsen ratings, which suggest that ESPN is seeing a 64% increase in viewers over its regular afternoon programming.
Still, they're not pulling a million viewers for these matches, so they kept Rae, Gray and Smyth in Bristol, and when lightning struck, we were all left hanging. That doesn't necessarily mean ESPN is being dishonest. The loss of signal was a problem for the livebloggers at the BBC and The Guardian, too. Were they somehow being dishonest because they weren't in the stadium, too?
Admittedly, the practice of keeping play-by-play announcers at home is unusual in American sports. Someone's always on the scene to call big football, baseball and basketball games, among other events. We're going to see more announcers staying home for soccer games, though, because the big games are mostly in Europe, and overseas travel isn't cheap. Kaufman might have a lot of reasons to criticize ESPN, but this isn't one of them. The WWL's coverage of this tournament has been pretty good overall. The lightning was just unfortunate.
