The Earthquakes allowed an own goal in the 71st minute last Friday and settled for a draw with Real Salt Lake.
No Shots Allowed – Still Tie 1-1:
In baseball, you see the occasional pitcher losing a game even though he doesn’t give up a hit. Well a similar thing happened last Friday night for the Earthquakes in their 1-1 tie with Real Salt Lake. For the second time in a month, San Jose’s defense did not allow a shot on goal. Were it not for a misplaced clearance by Victor Bernardez into his own net, the Earthquakes would have walked away with three points.
Wondo Notches Questionable Goal:
Both goals last Friday night at Real Salt Lake’s Rio Tinto Stadium were unusual. Chris Wondolowski got back on the score sheet after a month absence netting a shot from a clearly offside position. The AR decided the deflected shot from which he received the ball was played to Wondolowski, and allowed the goal. It was not a decision that was received well by the home crowd.
Univision Television Coverage Exposed:
RSL’s goal from Bernardez’ miscue was equally bizarre, especially if you were watching on Univision. This was due to the delay in finding out what happened as they were in the middle of a long replay. Univision has an exclusive contract to show a Friday night MLS match. Instead of showing up at a stadium with a traditional mobile production truck, crew, and announcers, they are only showing up with cameras and audio gear with the production team calling the game and working out of a studio in Florida. Spanish is the language of the primary channel, and there is an English telecast on the SAP channel. San Jose is featured seven times on these telecasts this year, which is kind of a pain for Earthquakes fans to watch. The first week they were on, the English feed took almost 10 minutes to get activated, and when it finally was, the audio was about 5 seconds behind the action.
This time I watched online and the audio seemed synchronous but the commentary was not of a high quality. Several player names were mispronounced, referee calls were misunderstood, misreported and often left unexplained. The most glaring mistake in the telecast, which exposed the downside of the way Univision is televising these events, is they completely missed the game-tying goal. The announcers are not on site and can only see what the director of the Spanish telecast is showing them.
When San Jose defender Victor Bernardez scored the own goal for RSL, neither the announcers nor the viewers saw the goal happen because the Univision was in the midst of showing a series of replays that took too long. In their defense, nobody on the field saw the Bernardez gaff coming, but if the announcers were on site, they could have looked away from the replay and at least would have seen what happened.
Instead we heard a big roar from the crowd, more commentary on the replay, then no real celebration on RSL’s part because nobody on their team did anything worth being congratulated. Finally a replay showed what happened on the goal. Then the announcers told us what happened exactly when we found out what happened. Not exactly a major league quality level of production but Univison paid a lot of money which is what mattered most to the league when the deal was done. It will be interesting to see if this is approach to production will continue. I’m not sure the league knows or cares enough to pressure Univison into a more expensive and traditional way to televise the games.
