“Is there a sense of occasion there,” our DAZN host Kelly Somers asked commentator Conor McNamara who was pitchside at the Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia ahead of the Club World Cup clash between Manchester City and Morocco’s Wydad Casablanca.
Conor, sensibly enough, skipped over the query, “a sense of occasion” being the very last thing this tournament has experienced since it kicked off ... whenever.
And this Wednesday afternoon game was a contest between a squad that cost less than Erling Haaland’s left ear lobe and his Premier League paymasters, so thus far – see, say, Bayern Munich 10, Auckland City 0 – the tournament has been a slight mismatch in terms of resources. And has attracted as much interest as drying paint might do.
In fairness, though, there were considerably fewer empty seats around Conor than there had been at, say, the Ulsan v Mamelodi Sundowns humdinger in Orlando when just the 3,412 folk turned up to view the fare.
But a hefty Moroccan contingent injected some life and no little colour in to day five of possibly the most unloved tournament in the history of tournaments, Fifa’s unrelenting quest to banjax the game of association football by adding this crack to players’ already bulging schedules showing no sign at all of abating. Anyone would think it has something to do with money.
The upshot, of course, will be that half these lads will be dropping like flies a week or three in to the new proper season, having had little or no time to rest their weary bones.
“God love them,” our GAA folk might say, and sure look it, they’d be entitled to eye-roll, their [amateur] seasons a bit on the squeezed side too. “Tell us about it,” the rugby boys would add, most sporting seasons unending this weather. Never mind the players, us viewers could do with a break too, little wonder we’re attached to blood pressure monitors most of our days.
The Club World Cup has, then, been a hard enough sell for DAZN, which some of us always called Dazin’ until a hipster pointed out that it’s ‘Da-zone’.
No matter, they’re putting their collective hearts and souls in to broadcasting all 64 games, when no other broadcaster really wanted the thing, and trying desperately hard to make it sound like it actually matters. When, apart from the loot on offer to the participants, it doesn’t.
They’re preseason friendlies with filthy lucre drizzled all over them, but they’re still preseason friendlies. It’ll never not be funny that Real Madrid paid Liverpool a whole £10 million to release Trent Alexander-Arnold in time to make his debut against Al-Hilal in Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium. If you bump in to a visitor from Mars, try explaining that to them.
But, yes, Da-zone have been tasked with building it all up. “A chance of redemption for Manchester City,” said Conor of Pep Guardiola’s bunch participating in the tournament, like lifting this particular trophy would make up for a calamitous real season when they ended it all with no silverware at all.
When Da-zone interviewed Pep before his side took on a team that finished 16 points behind Morocco’s league champions, he somewhat burst their bubble of enthusiasm, intimating that he’d much rather be recuperating in a sunny resort than doing pre-Club World Cup interviews when he was expected to sound like he was tingling. Which, to be frank, he wasn’t.
But again, in an effort to be half fair, you should probably judge the success of these broadcasting ventures by the bigness of the advertisers during the interminable commercial breaks, the price we mugs pay for free live-streaming access.
And Da-zone had ads for Superman’s journey to reconcile his alien heritage with his adoptive human family, one for a decidedly large fast food enterprise, another for Lionel Messi’s rehydrating drink, another for Gary Lineker’s new DAZN podcast, and one for a betting company that featured Harry Redknapp’s bulldog eating his slipper.
So, perhaps, it’s paying off? But what all of the above need to do is politely request that the camera operators stop showing us wide angles of the Club World Cup stadiums, those banks and banks and banks of empty seats doing nothing to make it feel, well, big.
The result in the Manchester City v Wydad Casablanca game? Ah here, who cares? (2-0).
