Fish With Hands

Okay, I struggled for a while with appropriately witty titles. From the looks of it, I couldn't come up with anything good.

Anyway, I've met Fox Soccer Channel announcer Max Bretos. He's a nice guy. And I've said in the past that I never cared for the Ty Keogh model of making every single play into some sort of controversy. Those things being said, Bretos and Christopher Sullivan totally dropped the ball, no pun intended, in their broadcast of Saturday night's FC Dallas - Colorado Rapids playoff game.

On FC Dallas' first goal, two Colorado defenders raised their arms to indicate, well, something wrong with Carlos Ruiz's run toward goal. At first I thought it may have been an inexplicable appeal for offside, except that this was on a throw-in and two of the players were clearly between Ruiz and goalkeeper Joe Cannon. When they showed the replay, it was more obvious, as Ruiz appeared to punch the ball forward with his left hand down around his waist.

Absolutely no mention of this was made at any point of the broadcast, I don't think. Certainly not at the time of the goal. If you've got defenders appealing for something, that should be some sort of indicator that you should pay attention to the replay and see what all the shouting is about. To be so oblivious as to miss this is, to me, downright neglectful of one's duties as an announcer. They made a bigger deal out of whether or not Abe Thompson was offside on Dallas' second goal, which screams laziness to me, in that they addressed the obvious one, but when the play didn't conform to the easiest point of controversy -- offside rather than a waist-level handball -- they completely missed it.

To be fair, I did skip the halftime highlights, so if they went back and corrected their error, good on them. But if they didn't, it's pretty disappointing.