The name Mario Machado (along with his colleague and contemporary, Toby Charles) should conjure up fond memories for those of us old enough to remember the first regular US broadcasts of international soccer in the 1970s.
Machado and Charles both broadcast "Soccer Made in Germany" on PBS, although the latter was the regular host. Machado would often appear on other soccer programming as well. These guys were the teachers of soccer to us North Americans who had not seen high quality -- hell, any quality -- soccer on TV. They were expert guides to a wonderful new world.
Well, when I taped the Ukraine - Germany World Cup match on the International Channel a couple of weeks ago, it was Machado and Jose Lopez doing the in-studio commentary, so I settled in for a "blast from the past" from my youth.
Ultimately, this was a big disappointment, for several reasons.
1) Machado and Lopez didn't get a clean, raw feed of the match, but instead got the German language tape, but with no graphics. Unfortunately, they turned the sound way down so it was impossible to hear the crowd, and one could only hear the faint voice of the German play-by-play. This created the bizarre impression that I was watching the soccer version of the Comedy Channel's Mystery Science Theatre 3,000, but with 2 important differences: the game was a lot better than the crappy movies on MST3000; and the guys on MST3000 are much funnier than Machado and Lopez.
2) It was unclear to me whether Mario knew who his audience was. Part of the time he was conveying such basic information that I thought his audience was the U-12 set who stumbled across this telecast. Yet at other times, it seemed as if he thought his audience were soccer veterans, but who last saw a soccer match about 15 years ago. In other words, he lurched from describing the most elementary of information to waxing poetic about players who stopped playing before the U-12 set was born. I can't imagine that either of the 2 audiences could figure out what the hell he was trying to do.
3) I was actually shocked how little Machado knew of contemporary soccer, particularly German soccer. Maybe the last time he did broadcast soccer was 15 years ago. He was unaware of the club affiliations of many of the players (he had to look them up), and seemed to have never heard of some of the younger German players (e.g. Ziege, Scholl). He also mispronounced the names of several German clubs, calling Bayer Leverkusen BayerN Leverkusen. In addition, he didn't know the correct name of the Champions League (which Borussia Dortmund just won), nor was he aware of what were the current standings in Group 9 (in which the Germans and Ukraianians played), nor did he (or Lopez) know the procedure that the 2nd place teams in each of the 9 groups have to face after the group rounds.
Mario, for all of your old fans, block out a couple of weeks this summer, get some back issues of Soccer America and World Soccer, surf the net, subscribe to Fox Sports Americas, watch some tapes. Get up to speed, buddy!
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