ESPN voices leave viewers in the Darke
The first half of USA-Germany included play-by-play mouth Ian Darke spinning an imaginary globe nestled inside his mind. It landed on a place he called “Cloud Cuckoo Land (CCL).” By the end of ESPN’s telecast on Thursday, we had arrived at that destination point.
While ESPN’s World Cup work has been consistently marred by a one-sided, red-white-and-blue bias, this is more about normalcy being turned upside down, which is reality in CCL. Like analysts making themselves part of the story on the day Team USA advances to the next round of the World Cup.
With the game in the final minute of mystery time, Taylor Twellman felt compelled to say, “I was at the forefront” of everyone who said Jurgen Klinsmann’s team would not get out of round one. Naturally, this was followed by the always nauseating social media reference. “And they will send me their tweets about how wrong I was,” Twellman predicted. “I was (wrong). And I can take it.”
His reign as toughest soccer guy (looking for more Twitter followers) employed by ESPN didn’t last long. Minutes after Twellman’s rap, Alexi Lalas raised him two mea culpas. “I (now) believe (in Team USA). I believe,” said Lalas, who sounded like a drugstore preacher. I didn’t think this team was getting out of the group. I said it. I said it to their face.”
Wow. That must have taken some scallions, but not real big ones — the kind Lalas and Twellman needed to make this inspiring USA Soccer moment all about them. And by the way, didn’t Klinsmann, a guy ESPN mouths are treating as if he is Mike Krzyzewski, say his team had no shot at winning the World Cup?
Consider this a minor detail. Just like ESPN treated the deluge in Recife. Did anyone else expect ESPN to have someone on the streets, showing the damage being done with hard rain falling during its pre-match show? Instead viewers got shots from inside the stadium, with Jeremy Schaap saying (at 11:06 a.m. EST, nearly an hour before kickoff) there was still a chance the game could be called. He also reported Team USA’s families, staying at a resort an hour away, would not be able to make it to the game.
The lack of coverage was a major oversight, embarrassing, too.
Viewers got a sense of how bad things were only when Darke/Twellman came on. They said if a police escort had not been provided, they would have not made it to the game. “It’s a minor miracle we are here,” Darke said. “. . . a lot of people abandoned their cars, certainly the wildest trip I had getting to a match.”
Imagine if a major weather situation had hit the site of an ESPN “Monday Night Football” game. There would have been a reporter on the field monitoring the conditions. Outside the stadium, there would have been coverage, too. For security reasons, we did not expect overhead shots from a helicopter in Recife. Thursday, Schaap couldn’t even get down on the field with a squeegee to check out the conditions. Either FIFA is calling the shots or the World Wide Leader’s lack of juice in Brazil resulted in no meaningful access.
Still, there was no shortage of verbal muscle when it came to reassuring viewers there was no hanky-panky, that both teams were playing hard and trying to win. “No sense here of contrived, coz y ( play i ng for a) draw,” Darke said in the first half. “Both teams are going for this.”
In the second half, Darke said: “Cozy contrived result? Don’t you believe it. This is all business.”
There were other references. Even the uneducated, like me, could see both teams were playing hard, going the distance. No matter to ESPN’s voices. The more they broached the subject, the more we wondered why they were so defensive.
Darke/Twellman could have better wasted our time going over and over and over the scenarios it would take for the U.S. to advance. They beat this to death, so much so that it seemed as if they believed the more they explained what needed to happen, the better chance the U.S. would have of moving on.
Fortunately (we think) these guys did offer lines reflecting the fact (at least that's what we would call it) that soccer voices have different sensibilities. Like when a fan ran on the field and Darke said, “There’s always one intellectual with that idea.”
Or Twellman on U.S. midfielder Jermaine Jones: “(His) screw (is) a little loose, but he keeps it under control.”
Darke (at 71:43 mark) speaking directly to the unwashed masses: “Shouldn’t some of you be at work, by the way?”
Even Lalas got off a good one during a discussion of the four-month suspension and fine levied on Uruguay’s Luis Suarez for biting Italy’s Giorgio Chiellini: “When FIFA says you’re a disgrace you know you’ve done something wrong.” See, it wasn’t all bad. Even though it’s still raining in Cloud Cuckoo Land.