There was a time, about a week in to Fox Sports’s coverage of this super-sized double scoop of an international footballing summer, when a strange and bewildering thought occurred to me. Jules Breach was conducting proceedings with chirpy efficiency. Alexi Lalas had consistently been man-marked out of half-time proceedings by the resolute German defensive screen presence of Ari Hingst. The easy and genial contempt of the European headliners like Giorgio Chiellini and Peter Schmeichel kept the yee-ha Americanness of Fox’s coverage in check. And Landon Donovan’s ongoing struggle to maintain his hairline had somehow managed to sympathize America’s most boring man, a commentator so aggressively dull he could have made the storming of the Bastille sound like a trip to the grocery store. Had Fox turned the corner? Was the network that, just two years ago, tried to turn Chad Ochocinco, a man with seemingly no knowledge of or interest in the sport of association football, into a soccer “identity”, getting better at covering international football?
And then it happened. Clint Dempsey popped up on screen with a series of squawks and garbles that failed to cohere into a sentence. Carli Lloyd went public with the heroic take that Christian Pulisic could one day claim Lionel Messi’s mantle as the greatest player of all time. Rob Stone called the World Cup “the big dance”, helpfully bringing it into scale with the NCAA Division I basketball tournament. Intuit Quickbooks, Allstate, and T-Mobile – the main on-air sponsors – started to take on the allure of old friends. The feed of Hungary v Switzerland cut out 40 minutes into the first half so Fox could show a smallmouth bass fishing tournament instead. Lalas eased into his 200th reference to the Copa América as a “bar fight”. I breathed a sigh of relief. The old stalwarts had come to the party. Magic was still in the air. Those of us who imagined a summer free of the hockey commentators, aggressive sponsor promotions, and college basketball analogies on which Fox has staked its reputation as America’s Home of Soccer have been rescued from the tyranny of hope. We’re back, baby: it’s a month-long feast of international football, and Fox is still at the buffet, dribbling into the cheese platter.
