When you can't watch

What to do when the game isn't televised? Well the options are limited but they do exist.

For "important" games I have been able to track down on-line feeds of international broadcasts and sat huddled in front of the computer screen, headphones plugged in, following the action as best I can. The downsides of this avenue are games may get pulled partway if the rights holder polices things well, the feeds are often not of great quality, and you will likely get "buffering" lags even if you are running a high speed connection. One other watch-out is the headphones kind of tethers you to one spot, the leaping out of your chair when Conor Casey emerges from nowhere to lead the USA past Honduras and seal a World Cup spot for the sixth consecutive tournament? Not the best plan.

This option isn't always the realistic one either, with the family tearing around and my attention required elsewhere I often will pull up BBC Sport's "Live Football" feature and track games that way. The site is definitely UK-centric so you will often get only cursory mentions of teams outside of the "Home Nations". However, for those teams and all games in the EPL, the host essentially runs a live blog/twitter style commentary covering the action in various games.

Maybe it's a British thing or maybe because it is on the web, but the fun part for me is that the commentators are able to "tell it like it is" and will often take a humorous slant or call out extremely poor play. The other highlight is reader texts often moaning about the performance of a particular player or team. These are great as the average Brit fan has this great self-depreciating defeatist vibe when things aren't going there way balanced with unbridled insane hope that they will prevail and their texts deliver on the promise of that combo.

The only Americans that come close to this (in my experience) are Minnesota Vikings fans, they just, absolutely know that they are going to blow it and are just waiting for the hammer to fall, but there is this one little glimmer of hope that maybe this time they won't miss the field goal (Gary Anderson) or throw that pick (Farve! hee, hee!) or give up two touchdowns in the last minute of the last game of the season to those (at the time) perennial cellar dwellers, the Arizona Cardinals.