waffle

Half time in the friendly between Sweden and Chile, and I’m struck by how much crap there is.

• On-field graphics. Circles swooping in and out — white circles — during free kicks, the distance written on a realistic but mind-wrecking angle, and a ginormous arrow.

• Six, seven, eight variants of the instant replay, in various angles and at various speeds. The score box flying in and out during these passes to signify live footage instead of the universal blinking R.

• Checking in with commentators on the side of the field – not picture-in-picture, but taking over the whole action for about half a minute telling us stuff we already know.

• Constant reminders of completely unrelated sports events on other network channels later in the week.

• Man of the match-style competitions to come in the second half.

This is crap. No, really. Crap. I can understand people wanting overt analysis overload, arrows on the field and eight angle/speed combinations of field situations. I can see people wanting to win a trip to the upcoming World Cupto a European championship qualifier game in November (what an anti-climax). However, I’m interested in the game and the game alone – which I define to a quick replay when necessary, analysis from the commentators and free kick distances in a box at the bottom.

Updated at full time below:

• The commentators kept announcing upcoming sport events in addition to the omnipresent boxes performing the same function.

• With about twenty minutes to go, the commentators began pimping the upcoming supposedly hot talk in the studio when the game’s ended. That’s nice, guys. Focus on the fucking game instead!

• Small changes for “third opinion guy”. He actually wasn’t on the field at all – he was simply out among the spectators. When he chimed in at the end of the game, though, it was purely a voiceover, not obscuring the game as such.

• The “man of the match” competition wasn’t pimped as heavily as I thought it would be based on other recent games. This was good in the sense that it gave way for game analysis, but bad in the sense that they chose to say “screw it” to that match analysis and instead pimp their network buddy channels instead (see above), where talking about the man of the match would actually contribute to the game analysis.

So to sum up once again, this is really fucking bad. I could take all the channel pimping if this was broadcasted on a freely available, unencrypted terrestrial channel, sure. But it’s not. And the rest is just very bad program design based on the assumption that people line up to hear the analysis first, win trips to distant and at the moment totally unappealing games second and maybe, just maybe, watch a game in the middle somewhere.