(Photo by Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)
Baseball, football, basketball, and hockey fans turned their attention to the pitch in South Africa this past week to witness one of the more improbable runs in sports.
Had the US team held their 2-0-halftime lead, it could have been even more surprising than the Giants' 2007-08 Super Bowl run. It even surpasses the Rockies road to the World Series in 2007.
ESPN was front and center to capitalize on the US national soccer team's success, and they did pretty well.
First, we start with the pre-game.
Rece Davis did a competent job as the studio host guiding along the pre-game to the FIFA Confederation Cup Final. He had some pretty good tidbits. My favorite actually being from halftime, when he gave the stat on the US being 98-1 when leading at halftime since 1993 (the one loss coming against Italy in the first game of this year’s Confederation Cup).
Davis also held a pretty fluent conversation with Alexi Lalas on what the USA had to do to stay in the game.
Speaking of Lalas, he is the best American soccer analyst out there, period.
He doesn’t have the best voice, but he provides excitement and makes good points through well-constructed sentences. He does have his occasional mumbles or “uhs”, but that comes with almost any athlete that is an analyst.
Lalas gave a realistic state of the union for US soccer after the match. He appealed to both new and old fans that the team is in the right direction, but still hasn't fully arrived.
The Brazil match proved that.
He said that US fans, players, and coaches should expect the US to compete like they did against Brazil every game.
That is a pretty accurate statement.
The US needs to start competing in these games before they can consistently win them. This group of players showed they can compete, and the next step is to show they can win.
That chance won’t come until they are in South Africa 347 days from now.
Once the game kicked-off, the quality of the commentary did not drop. JP Dellacamera is the best American play-by-play announcer for soccer. He gets the game of soccer much unlike Dave O’Brien, who called many of the important US games in years past.
JP is in tune with the linguistics of the game, such as “Dempsey has a go” and “Clark got stuck in there”. He can identify subtle, important play unlike most American soccer announcers.
Dellacamera identified Jonathan Spector’s great one on one defense on Kaka and Robinho, one of the more underrated aspects of the match.
Dellacamera reset the situation and magnitude of the game for the viewer every fifteen minutes. This reminds viewers of what the situation is, intensifying the moment, but also frequently informing new viewers who just tuned in what’s going on.
JP did mess up in two spots.
The first was not stating the referee’s name (Martin Hansson) after Brazil’s first yellow card. The viewer wants to know who and where the person giving the card is from.
He messed up talking about Spector’s injury plagued seasons in the EPL, saying he had a leg problem and a “concussion problem”, a rare misspeak from Dellacamera.
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