Football tonight. Holland beat Andorra with 4-0 in a world cup qualifying match. Quite the expected victory. There is more people in my hometown that play football, then in the whole of Andorra, so nothing else could be expected. We know this, but the Andorrian people know this as well, so the way they play football matches their sense of reality. In other words: they defend. And to be more specific, they defend with the whole team (in a lovely 5-5-0) and while doing that they try to do everything god forbid but the referee will allow. Tackling, holding, pushing, rolling, faking injuries and delaying the game where possible are just some simple examples of that.

So knowing this, it wasn’t to be expected to be the most excited football night ever, but what made a poor match so much worse was the TV commentator: Leo Oldenburger. Normally the TV commentator doesn’t bother me that much, but today his comments got very annoying, very quickly. He thought it was necessary to constantly keep mentioning how bad the Andorrian players were and how much they were frustrating the game with fouls and other annoying behavior. And yes, that was very obviously the case, and we could see that. But “WHY DO YOU HAVE TO KEEP MENTIONING THAT!?!”… what is the point? The Andorrian players did nothing wrong according to the referee and just played to the best of their abilities. And their goal in these qualifying games is to keep the score down as low as possible! And the way to achieve that is not how we play… But just except that! The fact that the commentator didn’t, I could still live with… but please stay respectful! And the constant arrogant undertone in his comments clearly didn’t show any respect.

I am not a big fan of football like that either, but I totally understand it. Can even admire it at some points, as it’s part of the game that not always the better team wins. But talking down and patronizing other people in front of millions of viewers, only because they act different from us, is just wrong and stupid. So Leo, next game they pick you to be the commentator, I will turn you off and listen to the match on the radio! I am tired of your whining!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 7th, 2005 at 23:10 and is filed under News & media, Sport. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.