Editor’s Note: Geoff Reid appears here on WVHooligan.com each week. This week he returns to tackle the fun issue of who is and who isn’t the best commentators in the game right now. Feel free to leave him a comment below.

We often discuss amongst friends and read on fan message boards our thoughts and feelings towards certain remarks that the color or play-by-play announcer said on air. Sometimes we agree, most of the time we do not. The beauty of our game is that nobody ever has the same opinion. Sure some folks have no idea what they are talking about, but for the most part our differing opinions on the beautiful game comes from the different types of football we’ve grown to love. So all in all, you can’t please everyone, and I’m going to go through a list of commentators I like and dislike. In my personal opinion, Martin Tyler and Andy Gray from Sky Sports in the UK are the two best anywhere and this is because I grew up watching and listening to their telecasts so it’s tough to please me! Continue Reading…

This is a subject near and dear to my heart due to my history of being in the broadcast world over the last few years. I’ve been working on coming up with some sort of guide for people for when it comes to who they will probably be listening to on a broadcast of a Major League Soccer game.

I’m going to be real honest about some broadcasters on this list. If you don’t like a broadcaster of your club or a national one, that’s fine. You can always voice your opinion below. Also, I just got to a point over the last few weeks of watching/listening to games that I felt I had to say something about some of these guys in one, long post and not in some short mention in a weekend recap or something like that.

Why am I doing this? Mainly because of my history in the broacast world and because I’ve done enough soccer broadcasting to understand what it takes to have a good duo on a call.

I will say this too, I didn’t find information on all clubs here. Some were real easy to find while one or two clubs I had real trouble. So if you know who does those games and have a clue about how good they are I want to hear it as well. And saying that, it also means I haven’t seen or heard everyone on this list. I’ve made an effort to but I know for the life of me I haven’t heard everyone. A good reason may be because there probably are more national broadcasts these days and on MLSnet.tv you tend to get the same clubs’ feeds over and over again.

For time purposes and my own sake since I don’t speak the language, no Spanish broadcasters are included on here. I hardly ever listen to those guys anyways if they are the only option for a MLS game. Usually my telly is on mute in those cases. One day I swear I will learn Spanish and actually listen though.

Let’s start with the big boys first. The national broadcasters. Continue Reading…

So, week number 10 is in the books and we can pretty much say now we are a third of the way finished here this season. Most clubs have played at least 10 games here, a few stragglers have yet to reach the 10 spot but for argument sake, we are one-third of the way into the 2008 season.

What have we learned in that span? At first the east was jumping out too far ahead of the west. Now the west is catching up with the likes of the two Home Depot Center clubs, Colorado and the two Texan clubs. Except for one rainy game north of the border in Toronto, the west actually put up a decent front against eastern sides. Sure those clubs were at home but it should be noted that they are giving the western conference something to talk about here other than how dreadful the conference has been so far this season.

Before the weekend we had two straight ties of 2-2 between Houston and Dallas and then New England and DC. Thankfully the weekend left us with either winners or losers.

Attendance figures were so-so for another week. We had some good (Toronto, Houston), some expected (Real Salt Lake), some expected but still disappointing (Chivas), largely disappointing (Colorado), and two dreadful weeknight figures (New England and Dallas).

A couple clubs were randomly off this weekend. Chicago and Kansas City. I must say its an odd schedule for the Wizards this year, and yet they aren’t moving into a stadium. Usually the odd schedule follows a stadium opening in August. Real Salt Lake has a fall opening stadium and they aren’t docked with the weird schedule. I suppose its more so the sharing a baseball stadium.

A couple main points to shoot out before we get started:

• Chivas is closely resembling a club that can be labeled as “back from the dead”…after a few straight games of no wins, the Red-and-White have reeled off three straight (two at home against the east).
• LA without Beckham and Donovan were largely what we expected…boring.
• The streamers are slowly getting annoying but I’m not buying into this pathetic nonsense about some things thrown on the field in Toronto. For one, the evidence shown looked like a plastic bag more than anything that didn’t even slow or stop the game. If it stops the play and disrupts the game that is one thing, but if its just something that floats out on to the field because the wind picked it up that’s really out of all of our hands.
• Thanks to Jorge Flores for Chivas, teams across the league are figuring out what they need to do to start their own Sueno competition.
• Even though the west is starting to catch up with the east in the standings, they still don’t have a club with an above .500 mark here. Yikes.
• For the first time (I think) all season we have a “if the playoffs started today” kind of standings with four eastern sides and four western sides. Honestly, it will more than likely end up like that when the times comes around. Teams aren’t separated by that much this season and I just am starting to believe that we will have a normal looking playoffs this season with four from each conference.

Continue Reading…

Hello Tuesday to ya. Many of you going back to work after the long weekend. The Hooligan didn’t rest however as Monday was a fairly busy day for me here (and I did have to go into the office and work).

A few things to get into this morning.

Chivas USA keeper Brad Guzan, hot off a stellar performance against my beloved Sweden has left California and is in Scottland right now on a trail with Celtic. All signs are now pointing to a bid for his services from the Scottish champions and Champions League participants.

Celtic has kept an eye on Guzan even after re-signing Polish veteran goalkeeper Artur Boruc. At this point, Guzan’s trial is more of a formality as the Glasgow club and MLS settle on a transfer fee. Guzan must still apply for a work permit since he doesn’t qualify through normal means, but sources tell me they don’t believe the work permit issue will keep Guzan from joining Celtic. Continue Reading…

This has been something I had been thinking up for a number of weeks here. Most of you may be like me and get utterly annoyed at how ESPN does MLS games. And in light of ESPN’s interest in broadcasting future EPL games, it got me thinking even more about what the Worldwide Leader needs to do to improve their broadcasts.

The interest is there really. ESPN is paying for the rights now days (as well as other networks carrying the games) and that is a good thing for the league but it seems like the MLS and ESPN need to get on the same page. The broadcasting on ESPN seems to be a joke for the most part and the coverage is pathetic in my eyes on ESPN’s part.

Continue Reading…

I guess you could say I am starting the week off in a very hypothetical mood. Most of what you are about to read is purely wants and desires that I would like to see happen. I know some things will never change in the MLS and I am alright to a degree about that. Some things here will change, mainly because down the road the league will have to do things to accommodate certain parts of their game.

I urge you all to post your thoughts with this as well. Again, these are just things I would like the league to improve on. Some are realistic and some are just purely thoughts coming out of my head this morning.

Its kind of a long post but let me know what you all think. Continue Reading…

I saw an article on a Chivas related website today talking about how the MLS needed to distance themselves from ESPN. The writer of the article was obviously furious with the telecast last night between Chvias and DC United because ESPN failed to get the game on live and on time.

I totally understand the problem with that. I was too upset with it and mad I missed out on the first goal of the game. There was nothing prime-time about last nights game either, which is even more upsetting that the league didn’t schedule this game a little earlier in the day even though it was a west coast game. I know the Chivas crowd in LA may have been upset with a 5 pm kickoff but I think it would have been a bit better for TV purposes if they had.

Instead that majority of the country didn’t see this game go live until 10 or 11 pm. Prime-time is not 10 or 11 pm in the night, that is late night territory that ESPN dipped into. Also telling fans that we “wouldn’t miss a thing” was pathetic to state, when indeed we did miss a decent amount in only ten minutes time.

Lastly, and sometimes in my mind more importantly, was the broadcasting itself. Why on earth ESPN picks guys like Dave O’Brien to do soccer games is something I will never figure out. Guys like him are a good reason to why people hate watching soccer on TV. Boring, uninteresting comments and poor interaction between play-by-play and color commentators is what ESPN has been doing to MLS broadcasts in recent years.

I like the color commentary choices, even at times when I get annoyed with them, I feel they are right for the job. But what I never have been able to enjoy in recent years is the play-by-play guys that ESPN throws at us. O’Brien is boring, Rob Stone knows the game but sounds like a total dork when he is out there, and put these two guys with any color commentator and it becomes weird and hard to listen to.

I know ESPN wanted to finish up the college football game and I am alright with that but I don’t get why the soccer game wasn’t switched over to ESPNNews or ESPN Classic or one of their 20 channels. I think the league and ESPN need to do a better job at scheduling these types of games when there is football going on now. These kind of mishaps hurt the people who actually want to watch the game and kill the interest in those who may be trying soccer for a first time.

I may be going on too much about this but sometimes it is good to vent frustrations even with if the best option that the league had to broadcast their events is the only thing that can produce results and generate more fan interest. I don’t think the league needs to break away from someone who is paying for the rights to their games. I do think some changes need to be addressed in the future though.

Anyone else have thoughts and feelings about how broadcasts go with ESPN? What can they do to improve? I’d love to hear what everyone has to say on this subject.