You’re complaining because sporting event announcers are discussing other sporting events that are taking place at the same time?

Are you new to sports broadcasting? I mean, as flippant as that sounds, what do you expect?

I have the same problem with ESPN doing score updates on games going on at the same time. It’s somewhat annoying, especially if I’ve made it through most of the game without seeing/hearing any spoilers and then see a “Final Score” alert ...

No, Santa, I know it’s not new. But as FSC blocks its delayed matches results, I was thinking that most likely the Champs league, too, would have delays overseas - due to the wide swath of matches taking place at any one time - unlike NFL for example where tape delay is unheard of.

I suppose my *real* question was the first one - does Yurp not experience the semi-sweet hell of tape-delayed broadcasts?

Part of it’s a personal problem, too. If there’s a match I know the result of already, I essentially can’t watch it, unless I have a stake directly in the match. I don’t really know why that is. Perhaps I am a Philistine, unable to appreciate the beautiful game regardless of blah blah. All I know is, once I heard that Anderlecht was behind 8-2 on aggreggate, I was in no hurry to roll tape.

I just presume that the expectation is that if you’re watching game A, it’s because you want to watch game A. A holdover from when there were fewer channels in a particular market and you had almost no choice in the matter so the only way to find out about game B is for the announcers to tell you about it.

Of course, now with satellite packages and the ability to watch a dozen sporting events at the same time it means that we’re not as specifically tied to a single event. Multi-stream recording DVR’s have further diluted this. I find it a bit odd that with the ever increasing choice for the viewer, the expectation that the announcer must then limit their own topics of discussion becomes more relevant.

Whenever I think of sports fans who devote themselves to the idea of remaining ‘spoiler free’ for sporting events they cannot watch, I think of the show Crazy Like a Fox from the mid-‘80s (with Jack Warden). In one episode, the son wants to watch The Big Game (Cal/Stanford) but is caught up into the mystery of the week. He spends the entire show doing crazy stuff to avoid hearing the results so that when he goes home that night, he can pop in the tape and enjoy it as if it was live.

Of course, the whacky dad ruins the game’s outcome in the last moment of the episode. Freeze Frame Roll Credits. HAHAHAHA!

I think the notion that a broadcaster should limit their discussion of other games, during a live game, shouldn’t be particularly enforced. If we’re talking about the crazy-stupid habit of networks running tape delayed events (Olympics as a primary example) but still giving the results, hours before they even broadcast the event? Then yeah, that’s really outrageous.

But if you’re talking about a delayed event and during the event the in-game announcers are talking about game B? Well, you can’t really hold that against them. They’re working for the moment, not on the off chance that a re-broadcast might catch some folks who haven’t seen it yet.

Sorry. No sympathy here I’m afraid…

Well, your Olympics example is actually what I’m talking about. In the US, the only way to watch a Champs league match is on FSC’s timetable. That’s all I’m saying. If I’d wanted to watch Anderlecht first, I’d have had to DVR Maccabi Haifa v. FC Salzburg, hold it, watch Anderlecht v. Lyon, then go back and watch MHF v. SBG. So if live, the assumption that I’m watching MHF v. SBG because I want to watch that instead of Anderlecht v. Lyon is an unsupportable assumption.

In the US. In Europe, I’m starting to guess, not so much. In which case the presumably European announcers, not tailoring their broadcast to FSC viewers, are not culpable, indeed.

(Except now that I’ve typed all that out, I realize that Anderlecht v. Lyon was on Setanta live, so my argument - at least in this particular situation - is basically moot. I just didn’t realize that option was available.)

I just think that now, more than ever, we can’t expect announcers of a live-when-they-are-announcing-it event to take into account all the possibilities that the viewer in question may not, in fact, be watching it live.

I can understand the peevishness, but short of having the re-broadcast be done with diferent, after the fact, announcers, you can’t expect more than what you’re getting.

The problem isn’t the way the announcers announce the game; it’s that they make comments on games they are not currently announcing. Short of halftime reports, I don’t really see a purpose in it. Considering that the people attending the game don’t expect any information on other games, who decided that the people watching the game need the extra info?

If they are doing a halftime report or an update, it seems like the announcers could “warn” people that it’s coming up. Some of us might have to go to the bathroom, after all.

Maybe the issue is that most UK and EU fans don’t think that knowing the outcome spoils the enjoyment of the game itself? Maybe the primary audience is watching for skill and grace instead of suspense? I have no idea.