Lights, Camera, Action!

So yesterday I watched two Mexican soccer games, Cruz Azul-Pumas and Morelia-America, sandwiched around a Major League Soccer game between San Jose and Seattle. I found them all entertaining, even though I understood very little of what the announcers were saying. I had difficulty following the announcers in the Mexican games, too.

Kidding. Mostly. American sportscasters tend to make me sneeze with their inevitably inane comments, especially when they aren't precisely unbiased and feel the need to proclaim that Seattle came to town to get rough with San Jose, speaking in the contemptuous tones that indicate just what they think of the Pacific Northwest and its fog-drenched immorality.

On the other hand, I sometimes find this less annoying than the atmospheric-and-passionate-yet-persistently-clanging cries of "Goooll, goooooool, goooool" from the Mexican announcers, trying to be a verbal version of the goal-siren in hockey games. They do the same thing with awarded penalty kicks: "Penaaal, penaaaal, penaaal." I don't mind that as much as the goals themselves. Yes, we can see it is a goal, thank you very much.

To be fair to the American announcers, there were a lot of cards in the Seattle-San Jose game, including a deserved red card for James Riley of Seattle. It was a choppy, bad tempered match-up, livened up by some nice individual efforts and some well-taken goals for San Jose's 4-0 victory.

Artistically speaking, though, the Mexican games were much more pleasing to the eye. Maybe it was because I wasn't distracted by listening to the sportscasters--though I was proud to pick out a few words here and there, like "of course", "Torado", and "goal"--but I managed to focus on the play, and the quality of the play on the field seemed much more dynamic, more fluid. It looked like they were playing on a much larger pitch; the local broadcast of the Earthquakes made it look like they were playing on a rough, narrower field, kind of like comparing a high school field with the Estadio Azteca, which, coincidentally, is where the Club America-Morelia game was played. In fact, when I was working out the premise for this blog, I was going to write that US soccer needs larger fields to work with, to improve the quality of play, or at least the presentation of the game. Then I did some pesky fact-checking, and if Wikipedia is correct, Buck Shaw Stadium's pitch actually has more generous dimensions than does Mexico's national stadium.

Which means Major League Soccer doesn't have that excuse for not matching the same fluidity of play.

I think there are two possible factors at play: technical skill, and the quality of the television broadcast. Both are key to the development and advancement of the MLS in the public's eye.

As a general rule, I think it is accepted that the level of technical skill for the individual player is better in the Mexican League than in Major League Soccer. This is also a problem with the US national team, which relies on organization and athletic ability, which are indeed strengths, but which are not enough. However, I would say this gap is closing, both with the young American players coming up and with the trend in Major League Soccer to recruit more and more young players from Latin America.

The camera work, though, that could stand some improvement. A lot of the time, I felt that the camera work made the field look cramped, and it was too focused on the ball, with none of the broader views of the geometry of the runs players make when they don't have the ball, the broader views that I love so much in the Mexican telecasts, and in ESPN's coverage of the UEFA Champions League.

Image is important in this country; let's polish up the broadcast of Major League Soccer matches, and maybe you will see even more interest from the public.