American football

Subject: American football.

Perhaps it's the impoverishment of the BBC or yet again, the impulse to appeal to minority interests. I'm talking about the broadcasting of that strange game, American Football. If ever a game were designed to allow maximum time to show adverts, to maximise on the money, this is the game. The game, so different to the frenetic pace of American Basketball, is a stop start game with speciality players leaving the field of play after completing their speciality and the continual shuffling around the field into set positions by the 'beef', those padded 18 stone plus blockers who's only aim is to block the opposing equally large 'beef'. The game it seems is contrived to make an event happen out of relatively static  programmed play. It's a bit like a game of penalties or the penalty shoot out in a game of football. The instinctive fluidity of a football game grinds to a halt at full time with only the set piece of the penalty taker and the goalie in play whilst the team looks on.

The broadcaster struggles to fill the time. Off field interviews, whilst the game plods along, with guests seems to have no effect on on our cognisance of the game. If we are watching the players or somewhere else, it seems to make no difference. Of course the BBC has a special problem, it doesn't have commercial adverts to fill the gaps in play and instead we have a studio full of loud ex players talking in an overbearing American accent in a language of tactics which is totally foreign to the uninitiated. 

The game continues with the group-gaggle, heavily protected players discuss strategy or what covers for strategy, bouncing their torsos off each other like mountain goats in the rutting season. Settling in the squat position they glare at the opposition a metre or two away ready to move that distance to hold their line whilst the ball is scooped backwards to the halfback who throws the ball forward to the wing who catches it to sprint towards the opponents line. And that it. That's the summation of the play. It's repeated time and time again, ad nauseam. It's like a director of a film set instructing the cast to move here and there for another shoot with the only problem that the shoot is the same each time. 

Only the skill of the commentator to inject life into this ever so slow manufactured drama of practised moves invites us to believe that this isn't all a subterfuge and that the important thing is 'the break' to allow the TV advert to drill down into our already befuddled brain.