GOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLL!!!!

Stunning! Amazing! Apalling!

After xx number of years, I've finally found a soccer play-by-play announcer to listen to. His name is Phil Schoen. I'm not saying he's great, but I can actually listen to him. I've probably heard him before, but just didn't put it together. I listened to him do the US-Mexico match on Mun2 and he was actually cogent.

((( PLEASE NOTE: This post was started a long, long time ago and I had lots of thoughts at the time that I didn't get in here so I think it sucks but I decided to throw it up in mid-creation. Read/interpret at your own risk. Phil Schoen is apparently at BeIN now. OUT. )))

So, I've decided that going to the World Cup in South Africa would be very bad. Apparently the entire cast of Killer Bees (trailer) has descended upon the country and have evolved the ability to look like people!!! It's people!!
Just listen to their horrible screaming!
Of course, the flipside is that I'll have to listen to the monkey-sucking cheese doodles that they toss up onto the airwaves over at espn (at least, I assume they'll cover it).

Ray Hudson rocks:
http://hudsonia.blogspot.com/

I don't have a problem with "onion bag." It's better than "could this be the one that puts xxxxx in the win column" or whatever by Ian Darke. A bit apples-and-oranges, but still.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2009/apr/15/tommy-smyth-us-soccer-espn

A semi-anti-English take:
http://goal.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/accented-english-spoken-here/

Here's a current (7/13) note: I can't stand J.P. Dellacamera and I just saw his name in an above link and realized I haven't heard him for quite a while. He must have moved on or something. So I got that going for me.
Update 7/29: Speak of the Horrid, I think I heard him doing a Women's Euro game or something I was watching on ESPN a week or so ago. He's one of those word swallowers. That's mostly what bothers me about him.

Boiling Coach Syndrome

Brad Stevens was hired today to coach the Boston Celtics. He comes from a remarkably successful six-year run at Butler. The first video I saw of this had J.A. Adande analyzing the move. He talked about the hiring process in general for a few sentences and then pulled the dreaded "saw the opportunity ... and jumped at it" soundbite.
I find this 'bite very misleading. We see and hear it a lot, and it's always implied to me that someone was called and offered something and before the caller could finish the sentence, they replied, "Yeah, I'm in." We do get the occasional, "wanted-guy did his research and discussed the freedoms/responsibilities/franchise direction/etc." before taking the job, but "jumped at it" is, to me, rather typical media-speak on the side of extremism. I'm not calling them out or complaining about this one since it's well down the list of extremist media-speak, but "took it" seems much more apt to the scenario barring extended information. There was bound to be a couple days of talking with the fam and breaking it down and coming up with follow-up questions to be answered and all that. But "jumped" just seems to me to be too active of a term for this process.
Of course, in his first news conference, Mr. Stevens may drop the "this was my dream job, I rejected Michigan, Illinois, Duke, Moscow Dynamo, Ajax, ManU, the All-Blacks, Vikings, D-backs and the Bad News Bears Celebrity Traveling Nostalgia Giggety for a reason. I was waiting for They'll-never-get-a-peek-into-my-head Danny to drop a dime and I'd be on the next bus."
It also may be that the guys in line for this type of job have a little card in their wallet that they can pull out and check their compiled info and get the process over with in a few ticks. But I don't understand that type of person anyway, so I'll ignore that possibility.