Austria took care of business against Northern Ireland on Monday, pulling out a 2-0 win that, coupled with Norway's collapse against England, means Austria can reach the quarterfinals with a win or a tie in Friday's decisive game against Norway.
Here are the highlights from my ESPN2 call with Danielle Slaton, our first game of the tournament. A good start!
It was announced last week that I'll be part of the team calling the UEFA Women's Euro for ESPN this summer! After calling the final in 2017, I've been looking forward to this for a LONG time, and it's been quite a process, so even though it was no surprise by this point, it was awesome to see the official announcement.
I'm thrilled to be part of our coverage of this tournament, incredibly proud to work with such an amazing group, and looking forward to a month of exciting games.
Please join us all month on ESPN networks, mostly ESPN2, with games at noon (11:30am pregame) and 3pm (2:30pm pregame) ET most days. My games are currently scheduled on ESPN2 the week of July 11-15. I'll share more when (if??) there's time.
If you're interested in the tournament, I'm curating this Twitter list with posts from various accounts, reporters, and personalities around the tournament. It should keep you informed!
I was thrilled to be assigned commentary on Sunday's Women's FA Cup Final, the culminating event on the women's club football calendar in England before this summer's Women's Euros. I was even more psyched to call a game that was interesting from start to finish and had some simply fabulous goals.
The game was in London, I was in Connecticut, and partner Julie Foudy was in California - just another day in soccer broadcasting - and we had a blast calling it. I didn't nail every call 100%: I couldn't tell if the first goal was touched on its way in, and I talked into Erin Cuthbert's screamer a bit. But overall, I felt good about our call. I think our excitement for the occasion, the players and teams involved, and ultimately the plays on the field, certainly came through
I call a men's cup final (the DFB-Pokal in Germany) next weekend, which should be really dramatic as well. Then I'm looking forward to finding a rhythm with a regular run of games this
summer, although I don't yet know what I'll be scheduled to work. No guarantees I'll get goals as good as these, though!
Calling a Red Bulls game in person for the first time since March 2020 was a blast on Saturday, made all the better by a thrilling finish in the thick of the MLS playoff race:
I’m first and foremost a parent, with young children we do not allow much screen time. I’m a husband, and my spouse is not into sports at all.
Other than games I call as a professional broadcaster, I rarely watch a full game straight through, even in research. I can find just enough time to get the starting lineups and formations, or 20 minutes here, maybe a half there. I can put a game on in the background while I type up notes. It never feels like there’s enough time to go around.
In the rare instances I do watch games I’m not researching, there’s always something else to focus on. One announcer is a friend – how is she doing? Those graphics look new. Since when does that company sponsor this sport? What’s happening on Twitter right now? I’m frustrated with these announcers; why am I not working this game? Is there a closer game I can watch?
But on Wednesday night, a 10:30pm ET kickoff meant everybody in my household was asleep, and I could choose to sit in a darkened, not-yet-set-up apartment and watch the US men’s national team in a pressure-packed World Cup qualifier.
I was hoping to do some flashbacks this year to look back 10 years to
2010, when I was in my second year as the radio play-by-play
broadcaster for the Houston Dynamo. Now with sports shut down and so
much of life seemingly on hold, it seems like the right time to aim for a
series of retrospectives, looking back at some memorable or quirky
moments from my career in sports. July 31, 2010
But that call was actually a sequel. In 2010, in a game the rest of the world knew as Thierry Henry's first MLS game (that was interrupted by a pitch invader who spectacularly evaded security and then crashed into a wall), the Dynamo played the whole second half with 10 players and came from behind to score in the 90th minute and earn a 2-2 tie.
Excited, exhausted, relieved at the end of a crazy two weeks, I went off, punctuating my call with an ecstatic, "Wooo!"
Slightly more than a year later, I got to call a similar moment with Dixon's goal, but since that one was a win and I was even more excited, my punctuation went even longer and organically turned into my (in)famous, "Woohoo!"
Thierry Henry coming to MLS was a huge deal. Getting to call his
debut should have been a hugely
anticipated event. But as it happened, it was way down my priority list
that week. If you're interested in what exactly led up to that game and that call, read on ...
I was hoping to do some flashbacks this year to look back 10 years to
2010, when I was in my second year as the radio play-by-play
broadcaster for the Houston Dynamo. Now with sports shut down and so
much of life seemingly on hold, it seems like the right time to aim for a
series of retrospectives, looking back at some memorable or quirky
moments from my career in sports. July 29, 2008
Your big break. Sometimes you know it when it comes, sometimes it takes you by surprise. My first one was no surprise: I knew the stakes going in, and I knew I had to come through.
A 24-year-old in my first year as "Web coordinator" for the Houston Dynamo, I made no secret of my ambition to become a soccer broadcaster. With only low-tech college games for campus TV on my resume, I called Reserve League games into a stick mic connected to our one-camera shoot for the technical staff.
The record books show I had only called two such games when my break arrived: Our radio announcer would miss the SuperLiga semifinal to take his daughter to college.
I knew this was my opportunity to show I could do the job. Several of my bosses went to bat for me and convinced our radio partner to give me a chance, and after a few sleepless nights and a whole lot of butterflies, I was on the air!
The open was not exactly next-level. I don't think it takes an expert to tell that I was reading a written-out script as I said, "From Robertson Stadium, it's the rematch Houston fans have been waiting for, an international grudge match, as the Houston Dynamo host Mexican power, five-time Mexican champion Pachuca, in the semifinals of SuperLiga 2008. Good evening everybody, I'm Jonathan Yardley filling in" … Not the worst script in the world, but definitely sub-par delivery. But hey, it was the biggest game I had done as a professional!
Pre-game nerves, interview malfunction It was actually good that I wrote it out. I was really nervous, and to make matters worse, I'm pretty sure this was the game where I recorded a pre-game interview with Dominic Kinnear on my tape recorder, only to get back up to the press box and realize I had cut the interview off after about 5 seconds. Mortified, there was no way I was going to ask Dom for a re-do, so I anxiously waited for the players to arrive and squeezed in a few minutes with the always accommodating and insightful Craig Waibel.
So I was definitely nervous. The good thing was, I had plenty of tape on Pachuca and was really familiar with their personnel, so even if my Mexican pronunciations needed work (Marioni should be mar-ee-OH-nee, not MARE-ee-oh-nee), I had gained a lot of confidence by the time the second half and most of the game's key moments came along.
It really was a rivalry with Pachuca, because the 2007 Champions' Cup semifinal series (Pachuca won the second leg 5-2 in extra time to win 5-4 on aggregate) was incredibly intense, and that year's SuperLiga semifinal was a classic as well. There's a lot of schtick now about SuperLiga, but the tournament was a big deal for us at the time.
How'd I do?
Listening back to this, I'm proud of some of the little details I worked in, such as, "Dynamo going right to left, if you're familiar with Robertson Stadium, attacking toward El Batallon." This is a little thing, a radio detail, but it's something I still enjoy on TV - finding a unique way to indicate one end of the stadium.
I don't put much stock in prepared goal calls, so I didn't know what I would say, but you'd better believe I did not want the game to end 0-0. If you're going to earn a job or at least put together a good demo from one game, you need goals! So I was sweating a little extra (Houston in July? Yeah, it was muggy.) when it was still 0-0 at the 75-minute mark.
As Kei Kamara wins the corner, take a second to appreciate that the 2008 Dynamo had Brian Ching, Chris Wondolowski, and Kei Kamara on the same roster. Ching (82 career MLS goals) was clearly the centerpiece at the time, but Wondo (161) and Kei (128) have gone on to incredibly prolific scoring runs. Wondo, Ricardo Clark, Stuart Holden, Geoff Cameron, and Brad Davis all went to the World Cup for the US, and Pat Onstad and Dwayne De Rosario are two all-time MLS greats -- this team was stacked!
On the corner kick, note the clarity in saying how many corners the Dynamo had taken (hat tip to JP Dellacamera for instilling that in me early) and me getting the sponsor read in. Not an easy thing to remember in your first game!
Now remember how I said I don't really prepare goal calls? Yeah, I think it showed on both of these goal calls. "De Rosario .. bends it in near post, Waibel deflected, Boswell buries it!" That's all good stuff. But it needed one or two more lines to punctuate the moment before laying out.
Similarly, on the second goal, my call of the build-up was all good and technically correct, and it comes through OK: "Brian Mullan on the right, cutting toward the end line. Mullan gets there, chips it .. Corey Ashe buries it! Corey Ashe has put it away, 87th minute!" Probably could have used a little something more there, but we live and learn, right?
At least I got to make a crack about Corey's height after my partner, then Dynamo academy director and now Dash head coach James Clarkson, weighed in. I also got to give James credit for saying the last 20 minutes in the Houston heat could favor the Dynamo.
Good enough to get the job
At the end, don't mind me starting three consecutive sentences with "the Dynamo" at full time. Force of habit for a local radio broadcast, especially when you work in the team's front office. But I had gotten the job done (the team winning a big game sure didn't hurt!), and that was plenty to celebrate for one night.
That one game proved to be enough of a proving ground. By Christmas, I knew I would start 2009 as the radio voice of the Dynamo, and that was a true dream job for me. There have been more "big breaks" since, and hopefully there are still some to come, but that SuperLiga semifinal was a big deal in my career.
I was hoping to do some flashbacks this year to look back 10 years to
2010, when I was in my second year as the radio play-by-play
broadcaster for the Houston Dynamo. Now with sports shut down and so
much of life seemingly on hold, it seems like the right time to aim for a
series of retrospectives, looking back at some memorable or quirky
moments from my career in sports. June 26
I've had the fortune to have a string of memorable soccer moments on this date over the years. June alone has brought my first in-person pro soccer game (2001, Columbus), Rice winning the NCAA baseball championship (2003, Omaha), my pro debut in minor league baseball (2005, Yakima), my first game as a sideline reporter (2012, Philadelphia), and my first US women's national team broadcast (2014, East Hartford), and an England-Germany shootout (2017, from studio).
But June 26 has had more than its share of drama, and here are three with indelible memories.
2002
As a college-credit-earning intern for the MetroStars, my first game sees me spotting for broadcast legend JP Dellacamera and sees Sports Illustrated cover boy Clint Mathis returning to MLS after the US run to the World Cup quarterfinals.
In the second half, Mathis went to the halfway line and tried to check into the game, only to be sent back to the bench by the officials. I was one of the first in the building to know why: His name had not been included on the original lineup sheet!
2013
Maybe the best goal I've ever called, and it wasn't even the wildest part of the game.
First, watch Darlington Nagbe's run through the FC Dallas defense in the US Open Cup:
I didn't get every aspect of the call right, but "dancing in the box ... just blew up one entire side of the Dallas defense ... that was something special!" felt right on the money.
Now what was I doing calling that game? It's a long story. Due to my wife's job, we spent one year living in Shreveport, Louisiana, which was no picnic in terms of free-lance work. But with budgets being what they are and the Open Cup important but not a huge priority, the Portland Timbers took the chance to bring on a "local" fill-in rather than travel their regular broadcast team.
So I drove the three hours to Frisco, Texas, and set up shop in a very familiar stadium (I have called FC Dallas television broadcasts off and on since 2012). I knew Portland fans would want to hear their call rather than the audio of the Dallas webstream, so I had fun doing a radio call but also explaining to those watching that there WERE fans there, they were just on the near side of the stadium under the roof.
At any rate, the game was wild, as you can tell if you watch the whole highlights, but the Nagbe goal was just a sudden burst of brilliance that took your breath away. And surely the offensive assertiveness and aggression fans have always wanted to see more of from Nagbe, despite his high level in the midfield.
Not only was the goal, the game, and the finish great, but we had one of the great post-game quotes of all-time. The communications staff brought a microphone down to relay Caleb Porter's thoughts after the game, and he dropped the line that his players "continue to show me they have big hearts and brass balls, because they know how to get it done when the game is on the line."
I mean, really, that's a hard night to top!
2016
Three years later, I called more Timbers drama, but this time I was a seriously neutral party.
Any ESPN assignment is special for me, even to this day after 8 years working for the company at various levels. To call an MLS Game of the Week at Providence Park, one of the best atmospheres anywhere, featuring my former club, the Houston Dynamo, was just over the top.
And the game delivered! Goals, energy, back-and-forth ... and a little bit of controversy at the end, when Joe Willis was whistled for a foul that allowed Diego Valeri to convert his second penalty kick of the game for a 3-2 Portland win.
I didn't think it was a penalty kick, but partner Brian Dunseth and I ran into an ebullient Portland owner Merritt Paulson afterward, and he (of course) had no doubt!
Nothing too fancy this June 26, but we can hope for more drama in future years.
I was hoping to do some flashbacks this year to look back 10 years to
2010, when I was in my second year as the radio play-by-play
broadcaster for the Houston Dynamo. Now with sports shut down and so
much of life seemingly on hold, it seems like the right time to aim for a
series of retrospectives, looking back at some memorable or quirky
moments from my career in sports. June 2, 2010
First, the play. I posted the full game highlights to YouTube, but start with the big moment: Juan Pablo Ángel hitting a 35-yard free kick in off the post and the goalkeeper's back! to give the New York Red Bulls a dramatic win in their new soccer-specific stadium.
Incredible moment. As someone who grew up rooting for the MetroStars and now covers the Red Bulls semi-regularly, it's a special moment to have witnessed.
Except it was heartbreaking for my team, the guys I worked with and worked for, and part of a particularly maddening stretch of games.
A long time coming
Most soccer fans in New Jersey and New York know the long-running saga that predated the Red Bull era of the area's Major League Soccer club. The MetroStars (the New York/New Jersey was dropped after only 2 seasons) played in enormous, way-too-big-for-that-era-of-American-soccer Giants Stadium (I always enjoyed hearing, "Estadio de los Gigantes" on some broadcasts en español). 15,000 fans was a decent crowd for that era of MLS, but stick it in 70,000-seat Giants Stadium, and the atmosphere was pointless.
The atmosphere was so bad that I refused to attend my first professional soccer game in that stadium (more on my first pro game later this month), and it was clear very few MetroStars games would feel like an event until they had their own stadium. Over the years, the team unveiled plan after plan for a future stadium, often promising details in "60 to 90 days," only to have something fall through.
I interned for the club in 2002, right in the middle of all of this, and we literally had multiple staff meetings in which we heard, "Butts in seats. Butts in seats. Butts in seats - equals - stadium!"
Red Bull swoops
The MetroStars were my team at that point, having grown up there and worked there. But then Red Bull came in with an initial plan to ignore the history of the club. At the same time, my adopted hometown of Houston was welcoming a new team, one I could see in person and try to support into a success.
It was an easy transition to make, made easier still when the Dynamo won MLS Cup in their first two seasons in Houston and when I went to work for the club. So every Dynamo-Red Bulls game was a huge one for me, especially the 2008 and 2009 games when I got to go back to Giants Stadium with my new team, finally calling a game there in 2009.
Fancy new digs
But 2010 meant flying home to New Jersey to call a game in a soccer-specific stadium, of all things! No more 60-90 days, no more dead atmosphere. No more high-bouncing artificial turf. Major League Soccer in a vibrant atmosphere, on grass, 30 minutes away from my parents' house: This was something special.
Red Bull Arena had opened less than three months prior when we (the Dynamo) arrived in 2010 for a mid-week game. I was excited to see the place, even with its surprisingly bland gray exterior and some of the quirks of the broadcast level. I distinctly remember setting up my equipment on a folding table at the front of my designated booth, only to realize that when I stood behind it, I couldn't see large portions of the field's corners. Because the booth was on the suite level, it had the same dimensions as the suites, with none of the seats that fronted them. So I had blank rows of concrete in front of me, and I took advantage by hopping over the windowsill and calling the game while leaning back against the booth. With the table behind me, I don't think I looked at my notes much that evening!
Emotions running high
It was also an emotional time from the team's perspective. Our leader in so many ways, the talisman of soccer in Houston since the club's opening game in April 2006, was Brian Ching. Just a week earlier, he had been left off the United States roster for the upcoming World Cup, a decision which was just utterly shocking in our world. I had been brainstorming content we could do around Chingy and former Dynamo player Stu Holden going to the World Cup, and the thought of Ching not making the team never entered my mind.
Chingy faced the music - and the media - upon returning to Houston in one of the more painful media scrums I've ever witnessed. He answered the questions head-on and did his best to move forward despite one of the biggest disappointments of his career. And in his first game back, the Saturday before this trip to New Jersey, he came off the bench and scored "in HIS house, Robertson Stadium!" as I screamed on the radio call, as we took the lead on the expansion Philadelphia Union, only to give it up and lose, stunningly, in stoppage time.
The game
So emotions were running high, for the organization, the team, the players, and even this radio broadcaster.
Then, during the first half of the game against New York, Red Bulls fans chanted, "U.S. reject" at Brian Ching. As somebody who had spent the last four-plus years rooting for, meeting, working with, admiring, and supporting Chingy, it stung me, and I'm sure it angered every teammate in orange that night.
It was Chingy who tied that game in the 65th minute, breaking the offside trap to finish a pass from Bobby Boswell. And it felt just as emotional, at least for those of us in the building, as his goal at home against Philadelphia had. "He's not a Dynamo reject, he's their main man," was my reference on the broadcast.
Just like the Philadelphia game, however, there was one more twist of fate. The Red Bulls got this free kick DEEP into stoppage time, from WAY out, with no time left. You don't often shoot from that range. But Juan Pablo Ángel was the OG Designated Player, a big-name player who came over from Europe at age 31 and more than justified the pricetag. He scored double-digit goals in all four seasons with the Red Bulls and was, quite simply, a cut above.
I still didn't think he would shoot from there, or that he could beat the great Pat Onstad from that far out. But with the help of the goalpost and a friendly bounce, he did, and it's one of the great regular-season moments I've ever witnessed in MLS.
But it was heartbreaking, too. Every coin has two sides, right? Now you know my side from June 2, 2010.
