August 21, 2007

The Choreography of Soccer

Vanity Fair's James Wolcott characterized me as an "aghast bystander" in his post that references my review of last week's broadcast of the Mark Morris performance from Lincoln Center. He doesn't agree with my premise that it doesn't make sense for the TV to cut back and forth between the performance and the musicians.

I think my reaction to this live broadcast is in part a result to my constant annoyance at how US soccer games are produced for TV.

American sports are obsessed with individual effort and accomplishment. While we have popular team sports in this country, the TV producers and promoters are always looking to hype the extraordinary efforts of the superstars. This approach works in baseball, basketball and football--baseball is easy because only one batter is up at a time, and in basketball and football there are so many breaks in the action that replays of individual performances can be re-played endlessly.

But in soccer focusing too much on individual wizardry during a broadcast can really mess-up how TV viewers get to watch the game. I stopped watching US soccer games because the camera is always zoomed-in too close to the player with the ball and the players immediately around the ball. And in addition the camera is vertically too close to the ground so you end-up seeing individual players more than the action unfolding.

Soccer is similar to dance in that it's at heart about the offensive team creating and using space in unpredictable and innovative ways to help push the ball closer to the other team's net. So with the American obsession with individual action dictating the rules of TV coverage, viewers don't get to see space being created by players that don't have the ball. We only get to see the immediate source and vicinity of the current action separate from how the game is currently evolving - this was my main criticism of how Mark Morris' performance was covered by PBS--although it doesn't seem that anybody else shares my annoyance at an excessive focus on individual performers at the expense of the larger picture.

In addition, broadcasts of soccer games are always interrupting the action with replays. This bugs me to no end. I like seeing replays especially of goals. But I don't like to see the flow of the game interrupted by replays. Soccer doesn't have breaks in the action like American team sports. So there is very limited time to insert the replays without messing-up the continuity of the game. So the reason why I want the cuts to Emanuel Ax axed is because it just interrupts the flow.

I guess I like continuity and I'm not a huge fan of the gazillion TV shows and movies that cut from one scene to the next every 1/100th of a second.

So instead of watching US soccer games, which aren't really up to the level of other countries, I watch Latin American, English and Italian soccer--those are my choices on the channels I get. For the most part these non-US games are covered in a way that is much more in tune with the nature of the sport.

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