My love-hate relationship with Fox Soccer Channel

Ever have that girlfriend or boyfriend who drove you absolutely nutso batty? You fought like gangsters. You both knew the buttons to push to make the other pop like a tart.

But the sex rocked and you had someone to eat breakfast with. Life was far more interesting with them, and came one moment every single day you were deliriously happy they were around.

Fox Soccer Channel does that for me.

I have such a love-hate relationship with the little soccer channel that could – but so often can’t. Or just doesn’t. I don’t really know … that’s part of the reason FSC drives me loopy.

Habitually inaccurate graphics. Chatty and/or corny announcers (who can also be wildly inaccurate). Shoddy camera work or poor direction. Lame quality on talk shows. My God, have they ever cracked the code on how to create lame talk shows.

Some of it surely is down to resources, which I get. Precious few folks can turn a profit in soccer, and FSC is probably no different. So I can excuse some of their trespasses.

But Holy Inaccuracy, some of the crap they botch is just inexcusable.

Just a couple of quick examples: If announcer Mark Rogondino referred to referee Michael Kennedy as “Michael Bennett” just one more time during last week’s U.S. Open Cup final, I swear I might have set myself on fire just to end the misery.

(More pissing and moaning after the break ... )

Last night during the U.S.-Poland broadcast – and let’s face it, these opportunities to show U.S. matches should bring out the best in the entire FSC crew – they couldn’t even get the U.S. lineup right! They had Jay DeMerit playing alongside Jermaine Jones as a holding midfielder. Never mind that DeMerit wasn’t even in Chicago. And never mind that Bob Bradley would be drug tested on the spot if he tried to play DeMerit at that position.

To make matters worse, Chris Sullivan just rolled with it! As he reviewed the lineups he said something along the lines of “Jay DeMerit will sit alongside Jermaine Jones in the center of park.”

Sullivan knows better!

I actually have a whole love-hate thing going on with Sullivan, too. He’s clearly a smart guy who knows the game. But everything is so outrageously over-thought and over-sold. Everything he says is just a tangled tumble of soccer-talk blather. And he’s in love with every player, with every coaching choice, with every formation. I swear, if a manager was suffering from dementia and rolled out a nine-man starting lineup, Sullivan would wax on about how he loves “the manager’s innovative choices!”

I still remember a match last year, during a Red Bulls MLS broadcast, as Sullivan kept going on about what kind of a fantastic job Juan Carlos Osorio was doing, and how his lineup and his personnel selections were reliably prescient. The Red Bulls were a bigger mess than a dozen eggs on the floor, and everybody knew it! Sure enough, Osorio was fired a week later.

Back to FSC … don’t let me get started on Kyle Martino’s show. In an sad and amazing example of devolution, FSC has managed to replace its previous, gawd-awful soccer talk show with a soccer talk show that is even worse!

But … all that said … no kidding: I love you FSC. I’m glad you’re around.

Please don’t leave me! I promise not to complain as much.