ESPN/ABC Part 3: The Last Bitch

I swear, last bitch on the telecast! I know I should be grateful, instead of looking the gift-horse in the mouth (and trying to punch his teeth out).

What's with the freakin' pop-up graphics? I know ESPN/ABC aren't getting constant ad revenue due to the lack of "television called time-outs", but seriously! Here's the madness in summary

• One of the pop-up graphics takes up 1/4 of the bottom right corner of the screen.
• They don't squeeze the image at all, and they don't always wait till a stoppage in play, so it often covers the bloody ball.
• It's content is usually pointless. Like what they will be discussing in the half-time show. I can wait till half-time dammit! Are ESPN scared I might switch over to Days Of Our Lives to hear some intelligent dialog?
• The commentators feel the need to narrate the pop-up also. So not only can't you see the player with the ball anymore, you can't even hear what's going on. But since most self-respecting soccer fans are forced to mute the commentators anyhow (see bitch #1 and bitch #2), this is less of an issue.
• The top pop-up that descends to show you a player-of-the-moment fact comes from exactly the same colour-commentary script the announcers are using, and you have thus already heard 4 times. If I get told one more time that the Croatian kid is the son of the coach, I may put a pencil through my earhole.
• The pop-ups appear and leave with an loud-swooshy sound effect. WHAT? DO YOU THINK WE MIGHTN'T NOTICE THAT 1/4-SCREEN HIGH THING COVERING THE F---N BALL????

I had to laugh also at the man-of the-match voting. Your encouraged to text-message your choice of player, a fine revenue-generating idea that, judging by American Idol, works with tons of silly people who want to add to their coffers. But they then skewer the concept by putting up the four choices at the 75th minute of the game! Take the Australia v Japan game for instance - at the 75min mark your choices were Mark Viduka or one of 3 Japanese players. And then Timmy Cahill came on to score two and seal victory.

Alright... I'm taking a breather and letting out the cranky-old-man air. Nothing but positive stuff from here on out (although, that's not easy after watching England struggle against T&T today either...)

(aside: full comedy credit to the Fox Soccer caption shown under an image of the Australian players piling on to congratulate Tim Cahill – "Mountain out of a Cahill" - Hah!)