Someone on SoSH was complaining that in soccer (I still can’t quite say “soccer” - it has that whiff of upper-class boarding school about it) that the TV doesn’t show you the strategy (of where the other players are in relation to the ball), and I was thinking, that’s not true of the coverage I’m seeing - which is a British feed. If done right, you definitely should be able to get a sense of strategy.
So maybe it’s just the direction American sports coverage has moved, with ESPN et al being overly obsessed with the closeup in soccer in the same way that they are obsessed with the closeup in baseball.
Here in Singapore we have four channels of each of the World Cup games: the same commentary runs on all four channels, but one channel shows the “normal” TV view (following the action), one shows the view from the top so you can see the tactics and strategy, and there’re two channels focusing on each team specifically. And then you can choose to see all four views at the same time if you want to seriously go nuts. And I really like those options.
Frankly, now that I’ve seen this, I’m beginning to wish baseball had the equivalent - beyond the normal view, they should let you view a camera focused on the defense, one on the basepaths, one on the batter, one on the pitcher, and one exclusively on Kelly Barons or something like that. There’s a reason digital cable has 1000 channels - it can’t be that hard to put a different feed into different channels.