live text replay
i started writing this blog as a therapy for having become obsessed with the albion and as a way to deal with the misery of last season in the premier league. it was a terrible disappointment after the expectation that this team had created through their brilliant footballing performance in winning the championship and reaching the FA cup semi-final the year before.
ron atkinson even said earlier this year that he had thought that the baggies would go up and achieve what would become a long-term consolidation as a premier-league club. their utter failure to do so has had a special frustration from the point of view of the club's overseas supporters, among whom, i have the privilege to count myself.
you see, up until this year it was pointless and impossible for me to subscribe to the ALBION WORLD audio commentary service offered on the club's website. it wasn't so much a technical or regional problem that prevented me the ability to do so, but rather, an ethical consideration. the problem was that the service would only work for WINOWS operating systems. i do not use microsoft products; nor am i a MAC user. i use a regular PC, but several years ago (and after years of using "pirated" WINDOWS operating sytems) i started playing around with several FREE and OPEN-SOURCE operating systems, commonly known as LINUX.
it is possible - and a great many people do this for practical reasons - to have a PC run multiple operating systems. you can have multiple versions of WINDOWS and LINUX variants on a single machine; and for the first few months i ran both WINDOWS 2000 and SLACKWARE LINUX on the same PC. as soon as i had figured out how to do everything in the LINUX environment that i could in WINDOWS, i abandoned microsoft completely. i came to adopt this idea as a philosophical concept. there are many reasons other than the practical consideration of having a faster computer not to use WINDOWS, most of which are, in fact, ethical in nature. but i won't get in to that here and now...
while i am able to pay expensive cable television subscription fees and get a full complement of premier-league games, championship matches were few and far between. in 2007-08, i saw the baggies 4 times: 2 league matches, and the FA Cup quarter and semi-finals. the rest of the season was followed on the BBC live text commentaries. but with the baggies back in the premiership and on weekly TV, i had the greatest hopes for the next season.
after the home fixture with portsmouth last year, and ishmael miller was gone for the season, i knew the albion were in trouble so i started to blog. a great deal of my early blogging had to do with the fact that i was going to "lose" the baggies as they would be back in the championship and limited to 2 or 3 televised matches a year; and as a committed free software user i couldn't justify installing WINDOWS on my computer for any reason!
two things changed drastically this last year though. first, the service that most clubs in the premier and football leagues use for live audio commentary on the internet changed so that it was now compatible with MAC and LINUX operating systems. as well, the football league had made a deal to broadcast 60 championship and league 1 matches on TV this year, and they're all being carried on SETANTA SPORTS CANADA. this means that all west brom matches would now be available to me, either on TV or through the internet as live audio commentary. besides that, i was lucky enough to have been in england this last september and had the most fortunate opportunity to see the baggies play twice at home in the space of four days.
anyway, the point of this rumination is to wonder what i'm doing here anymore? does anybody read me? does it matter? is what i've got to say - besides expressing the woes of trying to follow a team like the albion from overseas - worth the time i put in? can one accurately assess a situation from thousands of miles away and with radio commentary as their main receiving medium?
actually, i'm surprised at how much i'm able to understand about what's going on with the club. i heard two points made by the commentary team on ALBION RADIO prior to the leicester city match that were almost verbatim observations as i had made them in my blog of the previous week reviewing the watford match. it seems that what had been obvious to me had also been obvious to the commentary staff - and worthy enough to mention on the broadcast.
of course, i'm not sure that it would be the same had i not been to the hawthorns in september, or seen the first few matches of the season on TV. there are details that can only be fully received through direct visual information. for example, when i saw the baggies play at the hawthorns it was pretty clear that the left-back, joe mattock, consistently came up very high in attack and was often in danger of being caught out of position. in fact, on the tuesday night match that i attended v doncaster rovers, the albion gave up an early goal precisely as a result of the young full-back's poor positional play. this was a weakness in the team that persisted, was consistent and definitely cost a couple of goals along the way. in the last few games, however, it seems like he's learned his lesson and is keeping his position much better. you need at least an initial visual experience to make a fully informed assessment of a simple situation such as this one.
while life is not perfect, in that i still don't believe in DRM, which is the various intrusive forms of controlling information online so that it can't be downloaded or copied - as is the case with all premier and football league video and audio content - the situation is at least now a reasonable compromise. i have a paid membership account - made through the albion website - which allows me to access any of the live audio streams of premier and football league clubs that have opted in to the PLAYER setup.
still, the question goes unanswered. should i be writing about football if i'm not saying anything different from any other football writers?
i'm not sure. but i will, at least, chronicle this season - and at the end, make an accompanying video as well - as it has become possible for me to keep up with and gather the information needed to do so; and ultimately, i guess, because i can't get the albion out of my head!
No comments:
Post a Comment