Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I took some notes a couple of days ago; being sortakinda awake at the moment, I figure I ought to post this before it gets more stale than it is...

I had not planned to watch (nor particularly to avoid) the Olympics this year. I figured if I happened to be in front of the set while a sport I like was on and I didn't have something else I'd rather watch more, fine. Well I did happen to turn on the telly three fourths of the way through regulation time of the women's soccer final, and wound up watching through both overtime periods.

The first thing I found myself wondering was who was running the cameras (and directing!) -- NBC personnel, or some sort of centralized coverage that NBC just stuck audio commentary on top of? If it was NBC folks, were they from a Greek (or other European) NBC bureau, or were they Americans flown over for the Olympics? And if they were Americans, does this mean that American television people have finally figured out how to show soccer while I wasn't looking?

There's not a lot of soccer on US broadcast television. (I don't have cable or satellite.) The few times I've looked at it (admittedly not recently) it was unwatchable. They didn't know what to show. Okay, yah, fine, you want a close up of the fancy ball-handling, but if you keep a tight shot on the player with the ball while you wait for them to do something flashy, I'm going to have absolutely no clue what's going on -- you can't watch soccer without seeing where the other players are. What I saw of the Olympics didn't show me as much of the field as I would have liked, but I saw enough to follow what was happening. The one other time I've seen that on television, it turned out to be a Brazilian camera crew and director.

Basically, I saw enough to know what was going on, why someone was or wasn't passing the ball, and where the openings were, but I would like to have seen more of the defense. Admittedly, as it was I was already wishing I had a larger television set. (Hmm ... NFL football works fine on NTSC even if it's better on HTDV (which I would guess it would be), but I'm thinking HDTV would make an even bigger difference for soccer, which can be crammed onto an NTSC screen but isn't really happy there.)

I noticed that the announcers were explaining stuff I mostly found pretty obvious, but would have needed to be told if I didn't know the game the way I do, or if they hadn't been showing me enough of the field to see things for myself. I also caught myself yelling at the screen: "Cross! Cross!" "Clear it!"

(I also noticed that when one of the forwards (not Hamm; the one on the right) kept the ball when I would have passed, a moment later I saw why she had chosen to keep it. I muttered to myself, "Okay, a reminder that I was never a forward.")

It also struck me (hey, I've been away from the game a long time) just how freaking hard it is to score a goal. For that matter, how hard it is to get a shot on goal at that level. I got the impression that soccer is mostly a game of "wait for the other team to make a mistake and hope you don't make one first". As a fullback in high school (varsity) and college (intramural), I know I felt we'd failed if the goaltender had to do any work, but I'd never really appreciated it from the point of view of the forwards before. It's like sweaty, tiring, team chess. I saw a combination of US errors and Brazilian luck result in an opening and still fail to result in a goal. (Hmm. I should see whether I can find stats on the web for the number of saves on each side in each game in the Olympics.)

I also noticed that the Brazilian goalie was cute.

While I saw much that pleased, impressed, and/or amazed me (and was happy with the outcome), I was not thrilled with the accuracy of US passing. Am I being too picky? Also, it sometimes looked like the US was using man-to-man defense -- was that my imagination? And if not, is that common in soccer nowadays? (I was taught more of a zone approach in high school, and as defensive captain for our intramural team in college I had great success with a rotating zone defense (though that inpsired by having to accomodate a set of fullbacks with widely different levels of skill and speed).)

I miss playing soccer.