A Bit Of Perspective

So we sur­vived the first day of the EPL sea­son, yes? For those of you who missed it, The Gaffer held a live­blog over at EPL Talk for the first day of the sea­son. I was a part of it for a while, until my son fell and we spent a nice after­noon at the emer­gency room (he’s OK. no breaks. just sore).

The up-side to my absence is that I got to watch the matches on DVR in the evening, with­out the thrill of it being live, but also with­out the in-the-moment crazi­ness. With that, here are my thoughts on the day:

– Hull City was the story of the day. They played hard, the sup­port­ers were loud, and the game looked great on TV.

– Fox Soc­cer Channel’s sig­nal gets worse and worse. I don’t under­stand it, but I am frus­trated by it. I watched at least a few sec­onds of all every FSC games on dif­fer­ent TVs (my 50-inch DLP, a 32-inch tube TV and a 20-inch tube TV), and even on the cheap small TV, their games just look like they’ve been run through a slight Pho­to­shop fil­ter. Mean­while, Setanta Sports’ broad­cast looked bet­ter than ever.

– I’m not an FSC basher, and I dis­agree with my blog­mate in that I thought Chris­t­ian Miles and War­ren Bar­ton were quite good for a first-day broad­cast. They were leagues bet­ter than last season’s atroc­ity. The dif­fer­ence between FSC and Setanta in tone is one of con­fi­dence (Setanta) vs. a need to broaden the audi­ence (FSC). Fox has to sell their net­work, and there is a move to try to get the net­work into a lower tier of cable and satel­lite pro­gram­ming instead of up in the high end. The more pol­ished and pro­fes­sional they seem, the the­ory goes, the more they deserve big-boy treatment.

– Another Setanta advan­tage is the lack of half­time com­mer­cials. There are some, yes, but much of the half­time break is filled with a per­son­al­ity fea­ture or that sooth­ing Setanta music or — best of all — side­line reports. FSC is ham­strung by its need to pay for itself with half­time ads. It’s a fact of life that the pay ser­vice doesn’t have to deal with.

– My one beef with Setanta has always been that they show in-game scores from other grounds. I know that some of this is meant to screw over FSC or who­ever they are com­pet­ing with, and I only noticed one update all day yes­ter­day, but in the days of DVR and watch­ing other games later on “tape,” I hate know­ing the scores before I watch the game. I don’t look at soc­cer Web sites on game days until I have watched every game I want, but I have to hide my eyes on Setanta some­times, and with lit­tle or no warn­ing. If they included a sound like CBS did dur­ing the NCAA tour­na­ment or like ESPN does with its crawl, I could deal with it. Instead, I have to stay on con­stant alert. This hap­pened A LOT on the final day of the sea­son, and I hope it hap­pens less this sea­son, but it will always bother me.

– Oh, last thoughts: No way does Liv­er­pool chal­lenge for the title if it plays like that. Spurs either. And Ful­ham is going to go down. Book it now.

All in all, it was a great first day, even if I didn’t get to enjoy most of it live. Tell me what you thought. And enjoy Man U and Chelsea this morning.

A Bit Of Per­spec­tive, 3.0 out of 5 based on 1 rat­ing