The World Cup: Univision Si, ESPN No

The World Cup tournament has become better with every passing match, but not the commentary by the ESPN-ABC chuckleheads who are more interested in covering the back story than what's going on down on the pitch and too frequently do a pretty fair imitation of not knowing what they're talking about.

With Germany and Italy locked in a defensive death struggle on Tuesday, the guys up in the booth were more intent on babbling about this player's girlfriend or that player's rap song or some other player's tatoo.

So in a brilliant move at halftime, the DF&C and I switched to Univision, a Spanish-language station, and stayed there to the very end of the thrilling 2-0 victory by Italy.

While the DF&C is more or less fluent, my Spanish is shaky, but I caught enough of the commentary to have a much better idea of what was going on in the match, while the knowledge of the announcers was obvious and their enthusiasm contagious.

At one point we switched back to ESPN (which was on a 30-second or so time delay) after an especially brilliant play. The announcers there were rambling on in monotones and seemed barely aware that a soccer match was being played.

While I rooted for Germany, the outcome was again based on who played best and not on the referees. I now look for France, which overcame lame play to beat Portugal 1-0 on Wednesday, to best Italy for the whole megillah.