NYT’s World Cup Blog Takes on ‘The Sins of American Sportscasting’

At the beginning of this tournament, we received so many comments from readers complaining about the ESPN and ABC announcers that we had to ask you to stop sending them in.

…[ESPN's Dave] O’Brien in particular has come under a heavy barrage of criticism for his lack of feel for soccer, which is down to his being a baseball announcer who didn’t follow soccer until a few months ago. Some American soccer fans were upset with ESPN’s choice of O’Brien even before the tournament started, with one starting a petition to remove him in favor of a career soccer announcer, and certainly once the tournament got under way, the reaction has been consistently negative from fans in general, as anyone reading the comments sections to this blog’s live game reports can tell.

NYT World Cup ‘06 blog

Leave a Comment