Also, Copa America is on FoxSports1 and 2, and Sometimes Fox, so if you want to know all about the players in the 21st-ranked domestic league, they will tell you.
Also, not happy with ESPN’s color scheme of their score box, either.
Optimal scheme is: background of each team’s name is the shirt color, team name font color is player’s number/name color.
It’s not rocket science.
(Might be a bit of trouble when CRO wears their home uni’s, but, meh, either color will be fine, as their opponent will be wearing neither red nor white, 'cause Laws.)
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So Italy proved to be quite strong. Spain had 85% possession and couldn’t score. The Dutch were good in parts but were ultimately lucky.
Looking forward to France-Germany tomorrow. A non-draw could make things interesting.
The Spain match was pretty exciting. Despite utter middle field dominance Sweden had a couple really exciting chances, and the Swedish keeper was really on point.
Fluff article on The Athletic about Twellman. If anyone can paste it here, I’d appreciate it.
Re: Group F, if Hungary is a weak team, the other 3 teams probably still have an excellent chance to get through to the elimination rounds. I’m guessing they would each want to beat Hungary by at least two goals and then the third-placed team (if they narrowly lost to the other two teams) would still have three competition points and a non-negative goal difference.
There’s not a lot of examples of the 16 from 24 playoff system (where the top 4 of the 6 3rd-place finishers qualify) but it would be interesting to know what the odds were of a team with 3 points and a decent goal difference are of getting through.
Looking at 2016, the two teams missing out had 3 points but a GD of -2.
However, the 1994 world cup (with 24 teams) one of the teams missing out had 3 points and a GD of +1.
Taylor Twellman was looking down at his notes inside a large conference room on ESPN’s campus in Bristol, Conn when the energy dramatically shifted. Denmark midfielder Christian Eriksen had collapsed on the pitch in the 43rd minute of his team’s first match of Euro 2020. Everyone focused on the TV screens as a medical crew was waved onto the field and administered chest compressions while Eriksen’s teammates formed a wall around him in an attempt to shield the treatment from view.
“It was bedlam,” Twellman later says.
As Eriksen received treatment, Twellman’s cell phone began to vibrate. One text was from George Chiampas, U.S. Soccer’s chief medical officer and a member of FIFA’s medical committee. Another came from a neurologist he knows. Twellman went to the control room so he could review the moments before Eriksen doubled over onto the turf.
“I asked (the neurologist), how far back do I go? And he said, ‘Go back 90 seconds.’” Twellman says. “Because if there’s any kind of contact within that 90 seconds to the head, that’s where brain bleed could happen. So I went back and watched it and there was no contact.”
Twellman was due to join studio host Kelly Cates and analysts Steve McManaman and Mark Clattenberg on the set. Before he went on camera, Twellman contacted Chiampas, who told him “the rules of what you look at — if there’s no contact, then it’s (the) heart.” He then spoke to the producers and Cates regarding the information that he planned to present.
“I looked at Kelly and I said, ‘I’m going to reference a doctor.’ And she goes: ‘I’ll make sure that one of us says that (the doctor’s) not there,” Twellman said. “Which is literally what (former ESPN anchor) Bob Ley and all these guys have taught me to do. You can use sources. You can use stuff. Just make sure you’re clear on where the sources are, who they are and what they do.”
Once on the air, and with Eriksen’s condition still unknown, Twellman mentioned his own personal history with head injuries, and suggested that Eriksen had suffered a heart complication. Twellman, a former U.S. national team forward and Major League Soccer MVP, suffered a series of head injuries that ended his playing career in 2010 at the age of 30. Today he deals with post-concussion syndrome and advocates for greater scrutiny regarding concussion protocols across all sports.
“I went back and watched the 90 seconds before he collapsed,” said Twellman live on ESPN. “There’s no contact whatsoever. So, reaching out to a FIFA medical committee member, George Chiampas, who is the chief medical officer of the United States Soccer Federation. And you look at it from a doctor’s perspective. Two ways, was it contact or was it non-contact? This was non-contact. And so that means this is his heart.”
Twellman was immediately criticized on social media for appearing to speculate and diagnose Eriksen from afar. Many viewers also felt his comments were critical of the medical team that attended to Eriksen.
“It took (the medical team) one minute and 48 to 49 seconds after he collapses to then perform the CPR when you go back and watch,” Twellman said live on ESPN. “And that’s the scary thing… because the longer it took for them to recognize that he was unresponsive, that it wasn’t a head injury, that’s where this thing gets scary and that’s where this thing is way more than football, soccer, any kind of sport…you just hope that the right decision was made in the perfect amount of time.”
The next day, Twellman reflects on what he said.
“In hindsight, I wish I didn’t make the seamless transition from contact to no contact and say ‘It’s his heart,’” Twellman says. “I wish I would’ve said just two words: ‘that means it’s most likely his heart.’ If I said that phrase, I think it changes everyone’s perspective. The problem is, when the emotions are high, and I’m talking to a viewer, your tone has to be so neutral. And that was very difficult for me in that moment to have a neutral tone because I was scared that it was bad.
“I started to choke up when I thought of the 1:48 seconds,” Twellman continues. “I don’t think people fully understand. One minute, forty-eight (seconds) sounds like nothing. When you’re swallowing your tongue and you’re unresponsive, a minute forty-eight of your heart not beating is scary as shit. I was like, ‘Oh my god.’ It was never about being right. It was more so bringing perspective from someone who is an expert in the field and how the EMTs were going to assess the situation. Thankfully, they responded perfectly.”
Denmark’s team doctor Morten Boesen later confirmed that Eriksen had gone into cardiac arrest before he was resuscitated on the field. Eriksen is alive today because of the medical professionals who quickly sprung to action in Copenhagen.
“What I take from it, honestly, I hope I never have that moment again,” Twellman says. “Because that means someone collapsed on the field. I kinda wish I had used maybe two, three different words so people understood where I was emotionally.”
Twellman first rose to prominence as a television personality in 2017 on a show that no longer exists: SportsCenter in name, but one broadcast on ESPNews. It was, for lack of a more charitable term, a highlight show for nobody.
“Most people didn’t want to produce that show because there was a negative connotation internally,” says former ESPN line producer Joe Rodríguez. “The talk was that nobody was watching.”
The sentiment was similar for those in front of the camera.
“When you went on those ESPNews shows you wanted to do a good job, but you knew that this was not programming to the masses,” former ESPN anchor Max Bretos says. “We would just drudge through Pacers versus Wizards highlights for the fifth time.”
The show has since been discontinued, replaced by game replays or reruns of evergreen ESPN programming. But on one particular night in 2017, SportsCenter on ESPNews was to serve as the spot for post-match analysis for the U.S. men’s national team’s decisive World Cup qualifying game against Trinidad and Tobago – analysis that most assumed would be focused on the U.S. getting at least the draw it needed to seal a spot in a tournament the team hadn’t missed since 1986.
“At first we were like… it’s just T&T,” Rodríguez recalls. “I was going to make that my lead story because obviously the U.S. was going to clinch.”
Then U.S. defender Omar Gonzalez scored an own goal and T&T’s Alvin Jones doubled the underdogs’ lead 20 minutes later. The visiting U.S., led by head coach Bruce Arena, were struggling on the water-logged pitch in Couva.
Off camera, Rodríguez and Twellman watched parts of the game together as Bretos anchored the show with Nicole Briscoe. The mood on set became darker and darker, even after Christian Pulisic scored early in the second half to cut into the T&T lead.
“I started having a dialogue with Taylor,” says Rodríguez. “I could sense in his tone of voice that he was getting agitated and he was getting annoyed about the different things that were happening, but I was also producing my show. Once we got to like the 85th minute, (Twellman) started dropping F-bombs in my ear. ‘What the fuck are these guys doing!’ You could sense the agitation.”
Then the final whistle blew, and the reality of the historic failure set in. The U.S. would not be at the 2018 World Cup in Russia. Rodríguez requested a two-shot of Bretos and Twellman from the director, then grabbed Twellman for a quick conversation before going live.
“I remember telling Taylor, ‘Dude, everything that you just told me; all these emotions and all of these things that you’re going through,’” Rodríguez says. “‘Do not hold anything back. Just let them have it.’”
Twellman obliged.
“If this failure does not wake up everyone from U.S. Soccer to Major League Soccer, to pay-to-play, to broadcasters, to everything — then we’re all insane!,” Twellman exclaimed that night. “Because the definition of insanity is doing the exact same thing knowing the results. And if we don’t change it, and I mean we, everyone in U.S. soccer, then what are we doing? What’s the point?”
There was no script. Rodríguez communicated with both Bretos and Twellman via earpiece. As best he could, Bretos remained calm and upright in his chair as he interjected points of contention for Twellman to devour.
“I just wanted to keep him going,” says Bretos. “Go, go, go. This is really good. Let him go. Let him just empty the chamber. Once he stops, get back in there and just feed the monster again.”
Twellman was beginning to heat up.
“Typically a segment like this is meant to go for only three to four minutes,” Rodriguez says. “But when I saw that, I was just like, we’re going to talk until these guys both get tired of talking.”
After Bretos said that “the gloves are off” regarding criticism of U.S. Soccer, Twellman pointed at the camera, acknowledged the red light on the front of it and delivered his now-famous remark.
“Are you kidding me? We can’t beat Trinidad on a field that’s too wet and too heavy? What are we doing! What are we doing!”
It was clear immediately that Twellman had struck a nerve.
“In the history of ESPNews, nothing was more viral,” says Bretos. “The producer posted that (on Twitter) and I retweeted it. I looked at my Twitter feed. Oh my God. I’ve never had a tweet perform like this. And it’s still performing. That moment after was pretty telling when you could see that this thing was steamrolling and people were hot. It was a very visceral moment.”
Rodriguez says that, if anything, Twellman held back. He could have been even more explosive.
“I am so thankful that I didn’t say the F-word,” Twellman says. “Anyone who knows me, knows that there was an F-bomb coming at that moment. I had no idea what it would turn into. So many people outside of soccer resonated with it. Is it some of my best content? I don’t know but it was raw and it was me. No regrets.”
Over the last four years, Twellman’s “What are we doing?” meme has been applied to any number of outlandish incidents across sports, current events and pop culture. For Twellman, it was an unexpected phenomenon that is forever linked to him and his personality.
Twellman, 41, is in his 11th year at ESPN and has become one of American soccer’s most-recognizable voices. He’s the lead analyst for the network’s MLS, U.S. men’s national team and European soccer broadcasts, currently co-commentating alongside Jon Champion on Euro 2020 matches. He also hosts a weekly soccer-focused show on ESPN+ called “Banter.”
In January, he made an unusual jump for a soccer-focused media personality, joining ESPN’s rebranded SportsNation program, which covers all sports, as a co-host. One of the show’s segments, led by Twellman, is titled “What Are We Doing?”
What started as a spontaneous tirade against American soccer culture on a lesser viewed outpost in October 2017 has now become a means by which Twellman addresses a wide array of topics in the sports landscape on ESPN’s flagship channel. The subject matter can be tongue-in-cheek and comedic, like when Twellman took on the Chicago Bears’ dysfunctional front office. The segment has also been an opportunity for Twellman to address controversial or sensitive stories of public interest.
Twellman had “a real issue” with former Miami Heat center Meyers Leonard’s use of an antisemetic slur on a video game livestream in March, and the NBA’s maximum $50,000 fine and one-week suspension as a punishment. Another “What Are We Doing?” segment featured Twellman criticizing Jacksonville Jaguars’ head coach Urban Meyer’s decision to hire strength coach Chris Doyle, who had been accused of perpetuating racism and bullying at the University of Iowa. Doyle later resigned.
“I was literally sitting there and I’m like, ‘This guy can’t be serious. (Meyer’s) hiring a racist’”, says Twellman. “I’m going off and my producer, Greg Colli, looks at me and goes, ‘What are we doing?’ And I’m like, ‘Oh shit, yeah absolutely.’ There’s no prompter. I’m doing it all straight out of my head. It’s 60 to 80 seconds of just something I feel strongly about.”
Twellman shares his ideas for the segment with the show’s producers through a fairly spontaneous creative process. It was initially pitched by the show’s staff as a daily segment, but Twellman suggested they choose the right newsworthy moments rather than overplay it.
“Did I think that night in 2017 that this is what I would be doing,” Twellman says with a hint of irony. “No, I was just as freaking shocked as anyone that the 2018 World Cup was not going to have the United States in it.”
Twellman’s father Tim played professionally in the North American Soccer League and Major Indoor Soccer League, but there were plenty of other family connections to other sports. His maternal grandfather, Jim Delsing, enjoyed a long Major League Baseball career in the ‘40s and ‘50s. His uncle, Jay Delsing, was a regular on the PGA Tour. Twellman himself played soccer and baseball in high school and was a kicker for the football team.
“Did I have much of a social life? No, but it was fun man,” he says. “I loved kicking for the football team Friday night.”
Twellman excelled enough at baseball to be offered a professional contract by the Kansas City Royals when he was a senior in high school. He spent that summer dedicated to the sport, but turned the Royals down. Twellman received countless offers to play baseball in college, but few from schools that had a soccer program of note — or ones that would allow him to play for both teams. Some schools recruited him as a placekicker in order to draw him toward their baseball programs.
Ultimately, Twellman chose to attend the University of Maryland on a soccer scholarship. He planned to play baseball as well, but after a prolific freshman season under Maryland soccer coach Sasho Cirovski, Twellman never picked up a bat again. He scored 43 goals in two seasons at Maryland, then turned pro.
His SportsNation co-hosts, Ashley Brewer and Treavor Scales, are former collegiate athletes as well. Brewer was a swimmer and Scales played football at Harvard. In that sense, it’s easy to see Twellman as the show’s “soccer guy,” despite his ability to seamlessly cross over to other sports — something that several other American soccer media personalities, like the aforementioned Bretos, Julie Foudy, Rob Stone and Katie Witham, among others, have also done.
But Twellman never planned for a post-playing career on camera. In 2008, a series of chance encounters over beers in Boston and a strange link to boxer Mike Tyson were the catalysts for Twellman’s path to ESPN soccer broadcasts.
“I didn’t want to do TV, but there was a guy by the name Tom McNeely, and he was coordinating producer for ESPN soccer and basketball; a Boston guy” recalls Twellman. “His brother was Peter McNeely who fought Mike Tyson (in 1995). We probably had 1,000 beers in Boston together. We just hit it off. I had no freaking clue what he did. And one of these nights we were in Boston, the Celtics were going on a run, ESPN had the game, and I met him for a beer and (McNeely) said, ‘Hey have you ever thought about TV?’”
At the time, Twellman was the New England Revolution’s starting striker, and he was close to finalizing a move to English Championship side Preston North End. Television didn’t interest him. In fact, Twellman admits that as a player, he usually resorted to platitudes when he spoke to reporters in order to contain his emotions.
“I didn’t major in broadcast or in journalism,” he says. “I didn’t trust myself with the media as a player. If I was really myself, there’s bulletin board material there both against my team and for my team. I just didn’t trust myself. I was like Bull Durham. I just gave you every cliché in the world. I deflected. I did that to protect myself and the team. Once I got into the media world I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I did not take advantage of all that access.’”
Two weeks after McNeely suggested that he consider television, Twellman suffered his seventh concussion during a match against the LA Galaxy on a mid-air collision with goalkeeper Steve Cronin. He stayed in the game, but that was the injury that would derail his playing career for good.
Twellman spent two seasons recovering before he was forced to retire at the conclusion of the 2010 MLS season. Along the way, he would frequently run into McNeely around Boston, unsure of what his future without soccer would be.
“It was the 2010 World Cup,” Twellman says. “I’m still not playing, still recovering. McNeely calls me from (World Cup host nation) South Africa and says, ‘I’m in a real bind. ‘I need you to get to San Jose in four days to do a Tottenham-San Jose Earthquakes friendly.’ I turned him down. I was in a former teammate of mine’s wedding. Tom calls me back like two hours later. ‘This may be your only chance. Get on the frickin plane now. I don’t care if you haven’t done any prep, just go because I want to see if you like it.’”
Twellman rushed to the airport and flew to San Jose, where he was paired as an analyst with Stone, completely unsure of even some of the basics of the job.
“I had no idea that when replays come up, that’s when I talk,” Twellman says. “I didn’t know anything. Tom calls me that night. I was like, ‘Tom, I’m so sorry man, it was awful.’ He goes, ‘Actually our talent people watched. They want to give you two more games, and I was like, ‘Are they blind?’ I got hooked, and that was 11 years ago.”
The transition from athlete to television personality is a difficult one, and some are better suited to it than others. One trait that is crucial in both professions is the ability to handle criticism. Twellman learned as much in recent days, and not for the first time.
In March, U.S. men’s national team and Toronto FC forward Jozy Altidore criticized Twellman’s national team career and position at ESPN in a series of tweets. “He a white boy with connects. Stop giving him a platform,” tweeted Altidore.
Twellman declined to comment on the matter, but says that being accountable for one’s analysis and opinion is part of any pundit’s job.
“I’ve been approached by wives, girlfriends, brothers, sisters, moms, dads; both positively and negatively,” says Twellman. “After they have their conversation or get something off their chest they understand what my job is. There was no shot taken. It was just my opinion.
“When the red light’s on, you’ve got to be good enough where you don’t know the red light’s on,” he continues. “That is the most difficult thing for anyone transitioning into (television). I had thick skin as a player, so I didn’t care. I think a lot of people struggle with the negativity around it. We were family friends with (Fox Sports commentator) Joe Buck and I remember him saying this one night: ‘When I start a game I know 50 percent of the broadcast can’t stand me because their team’s probably losing or you’re saying something about that team.’ That always stuck with me. So that part wasn’t as difficult as it is for others.
“I know every game I go into 50 percent of the broadcast is already like, ‘He’s full of it. I can’t stand him.’ And that means I’m actually saying something. If you’re uncomfortable listening to your own voice, you’re in the wrong profession. You’ve got to be able to rewatch your shit. You’ve got to get over it.”
Mike Foss Jr. has known Twellman for close to 20 years. Once a D.C. United academy player, today he’s ESPN’s head of digital production and a co-creator of Banter.
Foss spearheaded the relaunch of SportsNation, which originally debuted on ESPN in 2009. His vision, as well as the concept for the new-look SportsNation, takes cues from the way audiences engage with social media content. The show is brash. It’s casual. It’s fast-moving.
“When you watch the show, you’ll see 45, 50, 55 different video elements in 25 minutes and that’s very much like the experience of scrolling on your phone,” Foss says. “It’s not so much a goal of ours to be first to anything, but to be comprehensive and to be cohesive. And so every time you experience the show, you feel like you’ve experienced that day on social (media), as well.”
Before joining SportsNation, Twellman had already made appearances on ESPN’s morning show Get Up, hosted by Mike Greenberg and Jalen Rose. Conceptually, adding Twellman to the SportsNation ensemble felt natural to Foss. Twellman is comfortable with self-deprecating humor, which is a part of the show’s tone. However, the subject matter on SportsNation, while casual in nature, is also far-reaching.
“In terms of us going into the development of the show and rehearsals, I can’t remember a single conversation, honestly, where we were like, ‘How are we going to solve for the soccer guy?’,” Foss says. “Taylor’s a sports guy. He’s really passionate, knowledgeable across the fabric of sport. When he’s gotten the opportunity to flex those muscles, it catches people by surprise, which is certainly an advantage for us. You can’t fake this stuff. You have to know your subjects inside and out and Taylor, whether it’s soccer or the NBA or eSports, is going to do that work and do that research and come correct every time.”
While Twellman felt an obligation to join SportsNation in order to grow the sport of soccer in the U.S., for ESPN, his inclusion was also a strategic decision. ESPN+ is home to a myriad of different sports, tournaments and original programming, with soccer as one of the main drivers of content. Major League Soccer, the FA Cup, UEFA Nations League and Euro 2020 qualifiers are among the many competitions on the platform. In May, ESPN acquired the rights to Spain’s La Liga. Twellman will continue to be one of the network’s go-to voices across all tournaments, which the network believes will result in increased viewership.
“Creating more of a multi-sport show that has Taylor as a feature talent helps potentially with that engagement factor for that audience that’s coming to ESPN+ to watch soccer,” says John Lasker, ESPN’s vice president of digital media programming. “Maybe they actually start consuming SportsNation as their daily news and information diet because Taylor was that bridge into the show. If somebody is watching (SportsNation) for Taylor, but thinks that Taylor is a soccer guy, and then actually starts hearing him talk passionately about a lot of sports that are far and away different or not correlated with soccer at all, therein lies an opportunity as well — especially if it’s something that that is on ESPN or on ESPN+.”
Twellman, like many other American soccer media members, feels like he is on a constant crusade to legitimize the sport in the U.S.; to break down the perceived arrogance and exclusivity of the American soccer model that hovers above the sport at all levels. Twellman was adamant with SportsNation’s producers that he did not want to always take the lead on soccer stories in order to make MLS or international soccer more inclusive to the show’s audience and his co-hosts.
“A great point to this is (Sportscenter anchor) Scott Van Pelt,” Twellman says. “Scott does more soccer now. Why? Because I finally told him to just do soccer the way you want to do it. Watching the World Cup with him, he was like, ‘Yeah, I love this shit. Like literally.’ I just think soccer’s got a real issue when other people outside of soccer try to do soccer or try to be a part of soccer. … I just think the more the merrier. That’s on me. I take a lot of pride in that. Because I can talk about your sport with you. Talk mine and I’m not going to make fun of you if you say something that is incorrect.”
As the scope of Twellman’s role at ESPN grows, there will be more live TV moments where everything falls into place, and likely others where messages get muddled, but the mantra of “do soccer the way you want to do it” is one that will continue to guide his work. And maybe someday he’ll even hit on a catch-phrase bigger than “What are we doing?”
“It sucks that it had to be at our lowest moment,” Twellman says. “Imagine the meme when the men win the World Cup for the first time. That’s what we all dream about.”
DTNF - I sent you a free week of the Athletic via PM
Thanks for this.
ArthurItus, I’m not signing up, even for a month (it requires my PayPal account info), but thanks for the link.
Nothing in there about his lack of knowledge regarding the Laws Of The Game, though.
I hope he doesn’t mind when I make fun of him for saying something incorrect about his own sport.
Only just saw the immediate replay of Portugal’s 3rd goal, and it looked clearly offside from that one viewing. (Not that it matters…but they didn’t even appear to check).
That Hungarian defender’s trailing foot appears to keep Ronaldo onside. I can’t get the ESPN video to stop exactly on the kick, but Ronaldo is quite upright when the pass is made. Certainly close and certainly needed reviewing.
Believable. Just surprised it didn’t get any review (I’m also watching with no sound at work…shhhh…so not sure what any commentators are saying).
The way France/Germany is going the more fit team should win. Lots of counterattacking and chances for both sides. The own goal was unfortunate.
O snap! That dude totally bit Pogba. Suarez has a new rival. Can they red card him coming out of half time? Don’t know if they can retroactively do so like that within the rules since it was missed initially.
I think you’re doing WFH wrong
Yes. Yes we are. Since last July. All wrong.
What are you a COVID doctor?
To answer your question, No, they can hand out a red card that far after the incident. Has to be before the restart of play; except in incidences where the restart is quick, then the before the following restart.
They can suspend him some number of matches after the match. They should have checked the VAR, as it is a red-card offense.
This is my first thought as well, but after the first replay of the goal, I am certain he was onside. That’s why no VAR review needed.
Btw, William Carvalho should have been taken out from the game much earlier. After he was taken off, Bruno took his position, and his through pass pierced through the Hungarian defense leading to the first goal.
Yep, there was a good overhead view that showed he was certainly onside