The World Cup from Minneapolis

First, Minneapolis is CST, 6 hours behind Germany. The game time slots for us are 8am, 11am, and 2pm. In no way work friendly. It's been a weird cocktail of watching half of the first game of the day before leaving for work, recording all the games of the day (thank some digital higher power for DVR!!), and sneaking off work for a few hours for the unmissable games (unmissable for me anyway, like today's England-Trinidad & Tobago game.) A group of us from the Minneapolis Brits yahoo group have gotten together for both England games. With two kids, I don't get to the recorded games until after 9pm. "The missus" puts up with this shambles once every gour years. Four to five hours of games means getting to bed well after midnight then getting up for work. Who said being an armchair fan was easy ?

During the day at work I do everything I can to avoid finding out the result. I avoid news web sites, blogs, and I'm even becoming nervous of checking email. Some of my friends have been told the score of the games of the day by work colleagues. Is murder understandable in some cases?

ESPN simply don't know how to broadcast soccer. They run news tickers across the bottom of the tv screen that display the results of the games from earlier that day, so if you watch games out of sequence you're done for. They also have annoying "tv pop ups", little segments of the screen that tell you statistics or publicise some other upcoming sports event. If the play is taking place underneath those pop ups you're done for. Then there's the annoyingly bad commentary team. The studio panel of ex- USA players providing half time and full time analysis could be ok if they were given more time. They're competing with relentless half-time advertisements, and tv ads rule here in the US. On the plus side, it's a lot better than it was 10 years ago.