Premier League Highlights on ESPNEWS
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by Tyduffy
Like a geriatric snail slithering its way across a wet driveway, ESPN has slowly but surely continued to expand its coverage of Soccer. New for this season, ESPNEWS (the best network in the ESPN family for actually getting news and highlights) has been including highlights of the Premier League in its rotation. It remains unclear whether this is a permanent addition, or a response to absolutely nothing going on in the American sporting world.
To Odds and Sods knowledge, there have been two highlight reels for Saturday and Sunday respectively. Saturday's featured a sole highlight, Gerrard's magnificent freekick against Aston Villa, while Sunday featured Rooney's injury, as well as Marcus Hahnemann's save of Paul Scholes' header.
The broadcast did not go off without a hitch (or multiple hitches), however. There were several mispronunciations, the obvious Derby and Reading screw-ups, and the slightly less explicable usage of a Spanish accent for "Aston Villa." There was also a minor faux pas by eschewing the more popular "Blackburn" for "the Rovers" and providing a stat (Blackburn has won six straight against Boro) that probably wasn't really relevant without context. However, a simple run through on pronunciations (or phonetic spelling on the prompter) could solve these problems pretty easily.
It was also a bit surprising on the Scholes header that ESPN did not make note of the fact that the magnificent save came from American keeper Marcus Hahnemann.
The coverage by ESPNNEWS was neither extensive nor well done, but it is significant by its very existence on the network. It could be merely a reflection of an increased interest in the sport, due to Beckham and the 2006 World Cup. But, since the demand for Premier League highlights was probably not that enormous, ESPN may be priming the public for soccer. Could this mean that the rumored ESPN purchase of Setanta is back in the works?
