I’m a casual soccer/football fan (I struggle with which term to use). I’m a long-suffering supporter of Canada’s national side, and enjoy watching European matches whenever I get the chance. I look forward to the big tournaments–the World Cup and European Championships–every two years.
The second most popular sporting event on the planet, Euro 2008, is on right now. As I’ve mentioned, we’re a TV-free family. I really only miss the thing for watching sports. I’ll go to my parents’ house or the pub to watch a game, but I like to watch the video highlights of each match on a daily basis.
Unlike North American sports, it’s ridiculously difficult to watch Euro 2008 (and World Cup, if I recall correctly) highlights on the web. No domestic network website–CBC, TSN, Sportsnet–shows them, and I’m denied by my IP address from accessing the BBC’s video. As far as I can tell, my only options are:
Spend CAN $30 to watch highlights and ‘full match reruns’ of all the games. Given that every North American league makes their highlights available for free, that seems pretty steep. I don’t actually want to watch many games–just the highlights.
Resort to ‘illegal’ highlights sites like the usually reliable FootyTube.
The Euro 2008 doesn’t offer a cheaper price if I don’t want to see full matches. Plus, they don’t give me any kind of preview of the video for which I’m paying. Am I going to pay $30 for YouTube quality streaming video (”hey, that pixelated blob scored on that other pixelated blog!”).
If I wasn’t going to Chicago next week, I might actually pony up the $30. Instead, I’ll rely on the less legitimate but free options.
For the past decade or so, I’ve made a habit of watching hockey highlights on television. I began with the sadly-defunct SportsPage (a triple-A show for much of the Canadian broadcast talent you see on the CBC, SportsNet and TSN), and subsequently watched TSN or SportsNet.
During the winter, these shows almost always open with hockey highlights, so I’d sit down at 23:00 and be done by 23:15 at the latest.
Living in Malta, there’s obviously no Canadian highlights shows on TV. Plus, we don’t have a TV. So, as I mentioned a few weeks back, I’ve been watching highlights on the web (the CBC, mostly).
This has resulted in one subtle shift in my viewing. Instead of sitting back and watching the highlights from all the games played, I must now pick which clips I want to view. What’s the result?
Surprisingly, I watch far fewer highlights. I always check out the Canucks, obviously, but after that I’m kind of left staring at the other results and wondering which I should choose. I lean toward the Canucks’ divisional rivals and Canadian teams, I guess. Plus I’ve been watching a lot of Penguins and Blackhawks highlights, because they have the most exciting young players in the league.
Part of my problem, I suppose, is that I don’t know which highlights are worth watching–besides the score, there’s no metadata. I can’t tell which games went to overtime, or to a shootout, or which featured a fantastic goal or save.
Here’s a feature request for CBC Sports: add rating functionality to each video clip, enabling viewers to judge each clip. That would help me assess which highlights I ought to watch, and which I can give a miss.
What’s the big lesson? Well, there’s isn’t one. What’s the small lesson? A reminder about mediums and messages, and how moving video from the TV to the web inevitably changes our relationship to it.
I’ve just returned from the local pub, where I watched Malta and Turkey play to an exciting 2-2 draw in Euro 2008 qualifying. I’m not aficionado of Maltese international play, but given the difference in populations (400,000 and 71 million) and FIFA Rankings (115 and 22), I assume this must be a historic result. Unimportantly, Malta’s squad may also be the baldest team in international football.
It’s extra sweet, because today is the 442nd anniversary of the lifting of the Siege of Malta, when the Ottomans were sent packing by to what’s now Turkey.
Hopefully some highlights will be available tomorrow on FootyTube, my newly-discovered source for football highlights on the web.
We don’t have a TV, so it’s nice to be able to get my fill of goals and incidents from the English Premier League and international play. The site is unquestionably illegal, so we’ll see how long it lasts. If anybody knows of similar sites (besides good ol’ BitTorrent), let me know.
I’ve also got a question for my Maltese readers: during the game, I saw that some people in the crowd were wearing black t-shirts with big white Maltese crosses on them (and no text, as far as I could see). Do you know where I might procure such a shirt?
UPDATE: Here’s the second Malta goal. Unquestionably, it’s the ugliest goal scored last night. But, as the saying goes, they all look the same on the score sheet:
