We all know someone like Alexi Lalas. He’s the ranter whose rants never actually say anything, the life of the party at the party no one enjoys attending, the “big personality” who’s always misjudging the size of the room. He’s corporate America’s idea of a fun guy, the type of workplace “character” whose business trip hangover never stops him from being first at the hotel breakfast buffet, hair wet, Untuckit shirt untucked. He would absolutely dominate karaoke night at a conference on infrastructure finance. If only this were the limit of Alexi Lalas’s actual impact on the world, our culture would live in blessed ignorance of his existence. But in the real world Alexi Lalas is not a small-time menace working the floor at an infrastructure conference. In the real world Alexi Lalas is American soccer’s brightest media star, and he is everywhere this World Cup.
When Lalas’s Roger Ramjet jaw thrust into frame on Fox Sports at the start of this tournament, it’s fair to ****** ume that many viewers felt a sense of dread similar to that expressed in the Grand Theft Auto meme: “Ah ****** , here we go again.” Lalas’s ubiquitousness every World Cup is American TV’s answer to the Iran War: no one wants it, everyone hates it, and as it drags on, it inevitably becomes a face-saving exercise in damage limitation. But there was also a glimmer of hope: for this tournament Fox has enlisted a pair of elite European strikers, Thierry Henry and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, to terrorize Lalas and shake proceedings up. Steered by Rebecca Lowe, this new-look panel has promised a slightly more sophisticated approach to covering the tournament than the yahooing belligerence that has been Fox’s stock-in-trade at the last two World Cups.
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Zlatan is a dud, the late-career Samir Nasri of pundits – all minimal effort and visible exhaustion. But Henry is magnificent, which is no real surprise for those of us who follow his work through the Champions League season on CBS. And he has already begun to work his blood-twisting magic on the Maga hack at the far-right end of the panel. Brazil-Morocco, Netherlands-Japan, and France-Senegal have all had their admirers, but for sheer drama and eviscerating beauty they have not come close to matching Fox’s on-set ****** le fight. The French aristocrat vs the all-American idiot: Henry-Lalas is the real battle of this World Cup.
Henry’s now-viral humiliation of Lalas in the studio kickaround segment the other day – passing the ball with one foot then dragging it away with the other, leaving the defender with 96 caps for the US men’s national team to dance with thin air – was absolutely filthy, and in the arena of on-set debate the action has been no less processional. This has been less a battle than a slow-motion scalping, and the good news is it still has weeks left to run.