Idiot Sport Commentators

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Ever have a game or race or any other such event ruined by absolutely the worst ever commentary. (No I am not talking of the Olympics, they are already boring as it is.)

It has happened here quite a few times when the Hindi cricket commentators treat a one-day game as a test. Long boring descriptions of the grass, the sky and the birds (avian not human female) flying about, with a mention of the the bowling action sprinkled in between.

But yesterday my friend called from the US and promted this post. He is an F1 fan and we used to watch the race at my home quite often before he got called to Chicago. The commentary we get in India on the ESPN-Star Sports feed from Hong-Kong is British and pretty good.
However the commentary in the US during the Chinese GP was dreadful apparently. Among other things, the idiots missed a Drive-thru penalty and Michael Schumacher's spin-off the first two times it was shown. It get worse when one of them wondered how it was that we were able to hear the team radios (which has been a feature for practically the entire present season). My friend wailed over Yahoo that they were ruining his enjoyment of the sport.

Do you have such horror stories as well?

 

I remember when Poland was playing football with Austria and commentator mistook both teams and to him Poland was Austria and vice versa. He saw his mistake in the middle of the second half

 

Pretty much everything from Fox. Seriously, why can't they find ANYONE who's good?

 

A Norwegian handball commentator recently described one of the Norwegian players (womens handball team) as "the hottest lesbian from Toten" while he was checking if his microphone was turned on. It was, and everyone could hear it . He's usually a good commentator though.

 

The CBC's sports coverage is actually quite good - in fact during the Olympics etc. a lot of Americans tune into Canadian t.v. to watch some decent coverage given that the U.S. networks are so pathetic. The hockey commentators tend to exaggerate how good a save was, or how good a scoring opportunity was, but that is part of selling the game I suppose.

The worst I have even seen was during the 90s when a U.S. network (I forget which one) decided to push NHL hockey to make it more exciting. Apart from glowing circles around the puck and animations featuring battling robots, the U.S. broadcasts had the most incredibly annoying commentators that I have ever heard. Their commentary sounded as if it was directed towards an audience of mentally retarded five year olds. Oh, and I know far too many intelligent Americans for me to accept the snide comeback about that being the average American intelligence level.

 

What I hate the most is when unpon reply of the incident in question, they can't see it as it is, example 1. : local TV air the F1 races, of course having Alonso racing, the crew travels to every circuit so in every race we hear 10000 stories about Alonso, it was in one race, Hungaroring, where Ralph Schumacher passed Alonso by the outside but upong getting to the corner closed the door to Alonso making him to drive over the... pianos? (the red - whithe thing in turns) so Alonso's car broke the front wing: WHAAAT just Ralph did!!! He crushed, broke and damned Alonso's car!! the commentator kept telling that Ralph caused the damage to Alonso's car even whe the in car camera was showing that Ralph passed Alonso by 2 meters!! They kept telling that the rear wheel steped on the front wing!! Come on! can't just tell what we all are watching??

The classics, example 2. : Real Madrid - Valencia, football game, Ronaldo is going, going, going, suddenly Aimar crosses, Ronaldo is going down, so you hear the commentator telling that Aimar fouled Ronaldo, and when the super ultra slow motion replay shows that Ronaldo just felt down because the air and Aimar just looked at him, the commentator still says that Aimar made a karate kick to Ronaldo... and that kind, many more...

The moto GP championship here is aired by the national tv channel, the guy can't pronounce the 'r' and pronounce it like a 'd'. And he pretend to know everything about mechanics (but he DOESN'T) and every race is the same: Gibernau is strong this weekend, he starts first and Rossi is 5th (always, every race), so Sete leads 99% of the race (always, every race) and the guy is telling that this time Sete is strong, Rossi can't catch him, BUT, we all know that Vale will pass him in the last lap leaving Sete eating his smoke, and of course, that happens (the fact is that Sete was first in the 95% of the laps of the total championship).

And of course there are those that comment the wheather, the grass, the people, etc., while the action is happening. Of course is not radio, but is annoying hear the guy ask what just happened.

 

On a similar but opposite note, I was actually quite impressed at the baseball play-off coverage I was watching last week. They made their comments on the play, checked the replays and freely admitted it when they were wrong. They praised the Umpires when they made difficult calls correctly (which was actually a very high % of the time) and when an Umpire made the wrong call they identified that this was the case but did not sit there and slam him for it. It was actually quite classy which is the last thing I expected from an American sports broadcast.

 

What bothers me most about the greek sport commentators is that many of them are influenced by their feelings towards the clubs.

Also, something a little bit irrelevant with the thread but very funny. The absolute nightmare of the greek commentators is the spanish football player Munitis, they always try to avoid to pronounce his name. The reason? His name in greek means "her <insert rude word for the female genitals>" .

 

I've never had a sportcaster spoil a game with his commentary before actually. But I have been irritated by sports reporters. After hearing their style too many times, it starts to get annoying and you wish he'd stop flourishing his comments with the same lame words. I guess it does make it more interesting to listen to, but too much of it is a bad thing.

 

@Boc: They could always do what Argentinian commentators do (by the way, I hate that too): they put nicknames, so, Guillermo Schelloto will be 'el Melli' and so on, for instance, if you always watched games commented by other commentators and then you watch a game with these ones you wouldn't know who is playing because not a single player is named by his real name. Better yet, there were lots of players that didn't liked the way these commentators called them because some of them were a little offensive, for example, if x player made a mistake, commentators nicknamed him Dumb; so when these players complained, the commentators got offended: 'is our job and we can comment the game the way we want'...

 

Not so much a commentator, but I still really don't like Don Cherry. Lots of people love him, but he's really starting to lose it with age. Sure, he knows hockey pretty damn well, but he has no ettiquete at all. Whenever somebody tries to talk, if he wants to talk he will cut them off and not acknowledge them at all. I've seen him get cut off by the cameras a couple times already this season.

 

Some of the local baseball broadcasters are a bit off the wall... Most likely hung-over as these guys spend about 1/3 of the year in a hotel.

 

Ditto what reepnorp says about Don Cherry. I wonder if he talks so loud because they keep his mic off.

 

My favorite dumb commentary comment had to be by Dan Dierdorf. It was a football game, and I don't even remember the teams playing. His comment however was unforgetable:

"In order for them to win, they're going to have to figure out a way to out-score their opponents."

Wow Dan. That was really insightful