A Tale of Two Broadcasts: Wales 0-2 Germany

By: Jan | September 10th, 2007

Germany beat Wales quite easily and effortlessly in Saturday’s Euro 2008 qualifier and moved 8 points clear of third placed Ireland. Mathematically there is still a chance that Germany could miss out on a summer trip to Austria and Switzerland, though most people are contemplating about whether Germany will be favourites to win the tournament or not instead. Goal.com offers a little analysis of Germany’s recent winning streak under Jogi Löw aptly dubbed Riding High with Löw. If you still need an update on how exactly the match went you could check out The Independent’s Klose encounter seals Wales’ 50 years of heartache. Though if you prefer your puns to be served with an alliteration uefa.com’s Captain Klose takes Germany closer might be more to your liking.

I won’t offer any in depth analysis of the football that was played in this blog post, but instead give you a little insight on how the Welsh and the Germans saw this match on TV.

This is a screenshot from the game as televised by the German broadcaster ZDF. Some interesting things to point out here. First of all, Wales is one of the few countries in Europe where football isn’t the number one sport. Wales is a rugby nation. So a meagre 25.000 came to the Millenium Stadium, which is otherwise ready to play host to up to 74.500 fans. The fact that Wales no longer had any realistic chances to qualify, and that a rugby match was scheduled closely to this fixture, didn’t help either. The other thing is that all the ads are in German / by German companies. I thought this might be down to the fact that possibly a couple of million more Germans were watching the match on TV, than there were potential Welsh customers. So the Welsh FA probably decided to sell all their adspace to German companies. And then there is this odd spot right on the pitch, which looks like displaying something, but I couldn’t make out what it was.

Here is the exact same situation as seen by the Welsh audience on Sky Sports. And as it turns out Sky had all their cameras set up on the opposite side. The stadium looks quite packed this time. More importantly all ads are now by presumably British companies. And the odd spot on the pitch turns out to be another ad. Sky was a second late starting their match timer, or ZDF was a second early.

Vorsprung durch Technik. ZDF uses some advanced technology to help decide whether a player was offside or not.

For the Welsh audience a simple freeze frame does the job.

A strangely distorted something outside of the pitch there. Now this is actually a clever optical illusion. If a TV camera catches it from the right angle, it can display stuff, like another advert. When I first saw this, I still believed that the adspace had been bought up by German companies and I thought that someone would surely want his money back after the match, as they messed up setting up the ad properly.

Nope, it’s actually a little ad for the Welsh audience and the illusion works perfectly.

And to finish this post here is a quick halftime analysis by both TV stations. Something went wrong with the recording of the German match there, so it jumps around and skips some sections. Sorry for that, but you more or less get what is being said, unless you don’t speak German.
Here is a quick and dirty translation of what is being said in the German clip: there were some good approaches to this match by Jogi Löw’s XI, control of the match was OK, but only up to 30 metres close to the Welsh goal, but nothing more, against very harmless Brits without Giggs or Bellamy, completely harmless, at least this result guarantees some suspense for the second half, there is a lot that has to improve until then.

So there you have it. “Lessons in the fine arts of football”, “excellence” and “absolutely superlative” from the Welsh about the Germans. Disappointment and the need for improvement from the German commentator who instead focused on the harmlessness of the Welsh team. About that stereotype of Germans being glass half empty people… The truth lies somewhere in between those two extremes I guess. Though I should point out that the overall response by the German media was actually quite positive after all as well. I’m surprised that the English have little trouble pronouncing Schweinsteiger, but they apparently got Kuranyi wrong. You don’t pronounce the ‘y’.