World Cup 2022: “Football match-fixing ends outside entire parts of the game”

StWhen you have up to forty cameras, it’s tempting to use them all and mindlessly press buttons on the console in the TV control room. Are the sports directors big kids who want to use their toys all at once? A football fan may have this impression every time he sees the game disappear from the screen in favor of images without informative value, breaking the continuity of the spectacle – at least what is happening on the field.

If the World Cup, which produces an abundance of technical means, is often a laboratory for various innovations, this is not the case with this 2022 edition in Qatar. After decades of change, the televised grammar of a football match seems to be firmly established. This sometimes seems to be only enhanced by a few gadgets such as video referee animations. The audience accustomed to these ways of filming is less aware of the changes imposed on it.

At the start there was a wide shot, shot high on the axis of the midway, the most informative: this overview shows the ball, the players who contest it and the positioning of almost everything else, which makes it possible to read the game. Follow him and foresee him. This basic shot has been gradually chopped up by others: closer shots of the player carrying the ball, close-ups of faces and, of course, slow motion – misnamed, these replays are almost all played at real speed.

Match interference

-‘s specialist TV football gameIn the title of his first book published by Apogée in 2007, Jacques Blokiszewski noted during the 2014 World Cup that matches reached almost nine hundred different shots, including one hundred in slow motion and up to three hundred shots. “Single Players” and “Faces”. We understand the intention: to give flesh to the characters, to recreate their emotions, to better understand the action by looking at it from several angles. However, this enrichment of the play becomes problematic when it tends to interfere with the match and not read it.

And directors are freed from what should be the golden rule of showing the ball when it’s in play, making it more interesting to judge a tenth of a slow motion or complain about a player’s plan against the referee. During the Ligue 1 match, there were thirty-one missed tackles in one half.