Saturday, February 16, 2013

Two faced.

The British press has had a field day with United goalkeeper David de Gea. This photos sums up their feelings. They go back and fourth between him being superman and a terrible keeper.

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

This is Gus Baby

This is not Dave O'Brien at the World Cup, but I was afraid that it would be. Gus Johnson became the voice of soccer on Fox Sports when he called the first leg of the Champions League epic clash between Real Madrid and Manchester United.

For a first outing it was not that bad. I was at work for the game, so I listened to it on Sirius and they used the Fox Sports audio featuring Johnson and Warren Barton. To be honest, I'm not the biggest Johnson fan to begin with. Never been a huge fan of his over the top style.

But to his credit he was a true professional during the game, he seemed to do a great deal of research in preparing for the game and that showed during the broadcast.

My concern about Gus was that he would not let the game breath and he allowed the game to breath, which was good to see. What makes English announcers so good is that they don't talk over everything and Gus did not. Fair play to him.

Gus said a couple of little things that annoyed me, the main one being when he called the ball a "football"

I think that Awful Announcing summed up Gus's performance perfectly.

"Gus didn't sound like a basketball announcer calling soccer, he sounded like a soccer announcer,'' Awful announcing wrote. "The rhythm of his calls and his excitement as the action reaches a crescendo is a fantastic pairing."