Added Time

No, this isn't about those retro Cosmos jerseys at Eurosport. I'm watching the tape-delayed broadcast of the Wizards and the Earthquakes on Fox Sports World, and I can't quite tell what day it is.

While I'm nursing a bit of a hangover today, and the clocks changed early this morning, I don't think either are the culprit. Since they're trying to show all the non-ESPN MLS playoff games, and KC-SJ overlapped with last night's United-Metrostars match, they had to bump one to Sunday. And since FSW's usual M.O. is to not send guys to the actual match, instead saving costs by calling the game off the monitors at the network's L.A. studio, Christian Miles and Sigi Schmid didn't need to call the game live.

So, on some level, they needed to establish when this game was happening, in broadcast time. They didn't. On the one hand, they talked about how Columbus and New England play tomorrow (actually today), but on the other, they commented on how the winner would play Los Angeles. This fucks up the timeline, as the LA match wouldn't be over yet if they were ostensibly calling the game on Saturday night. Either the Columbus game is on the same day as the broadcast, or they can't know the result of LA and Colorado.

I suppose they could have taped the telecast late on Saturday after the two live games concluded, in order to not have to pay anybody to come in on Sunday, but I sorta doubt it.

Granted, FSW broadcasts are basically two guys watching TV and calling the game, without much in the way of production guidance, and the broadcasting talent pool has been stretched pretty thin by the multitude of games, but this was pretty annoying.

And don't even get me started on the whole "in America, they call it sudden death" line Miles kept using. Where does he think this is being broadcast, anyway?