For any true fan of the sport, Beckham’s debut in the Los Angeles-Chelsea game last Saturday provided a feast of stuff to savor, even though the principal attraction entered the game only at 77:29.

I should explain that by “true fan” I mean someone who goes to games or watches them on TV, with more in mind than the final score, or goals scored by star-players. I mean the spectator who enjoys the nuances of the game: the particular skills of individual players; the interaction of players and referee; the one-on-one individual battles that develop in a game; the ebb-and-flow during the course of the ninety minutes; and even the knowledge (or lack thereof) of the commentators and “expert analysts”.

Let’s start with the player himself. Coming on in the 78th minute, he was not likely to have a major impact on the game. In fact, his appearance was a mere appetizer for the rest of the season for the crowd filling the stadium. After all the hype, how could the Galaxy not let him onto the field?

The club apparently had extracted an agreement that no one from Chelsea was going to clatter Golden Balls in a game that had no meaning for either club. At least let the player recover full fitness before he steps onto the field in earnest in MLS, where you can be sure he will be banged around.

So Beckham’s contribution was ten touches of the ball, one clearance from his own penalty-area, and a gorgeous forty-yard angled crossfield pass from the left midfield to the right wing. Nothing came of that great pass, although through no fault of Beckham’s. The player on the end of the pass received the ball in space, as Beckham intended. As we used to say so often on the terraces of Vetch Field in Swansea, where I first began watching professional soccer: “The idea was there…”

We did get to see a little of Beckham’s determination, as he challenged for a 50-50 ball with Steve Sidwell. Beckham tore into the tackle, apparently without fear of its consequences; Sidwell came in at the same speed. Their legs crossed, Beckham went down writhing, but to the collective gasps of relief from the crowd, not to mention the Galaxy ownership and management, within a minute or so, he was mobile again, apparently unhurt.

Prior to stepping on the field, Beckham was constantly in the camera’s eye: sitting, standing, undoing his boots, doing them up again, warming up, leaving for the dressing-room to have his ankle re-wrapped, returning moments later to finally make his entrance, in boots with names of his wife and three boys in red against the white leather, and the date of the game. A nice family touch, no doubt with the purpose of endearing him to observant fans! And at the end of the match, he and Sidwell shook hands and embraced to show there were no hard feelings about the challenge minutes before.

Beckham has made it his mission to galvanize interest in the sport during his five years here. Undoubtedly he will, at least in the first couple of years and in games in which he appears. We can expect them to be sold out affairs, and I suspect that televised games will have a greater point share of the national audience. That’s all to the good, but it does lead to one question: How are we to get higher-quality and more expert commentary on the games themselves?

ESPN broadcast the World Cup last year, and complaints about the commentators were widespread. The channel named Dave O’Brien as the play-by-play voice, even though he came from baseball and knew next-to-nothing about soccer. To accompany him, the experts ESPN selected were Tommy Smyth, a Gaelic football fan pulled out of a soccer museum to give very old-fashioned remarks about the game, and Eric Wynalda, former national team and World Cup player who had succeeded as a player on the competitive professional fields in Germany.

The contrast between those two is stark: expertise against ignorance; knowledge of the subtle details of play, versus error-filled inanities. And both of them wedded to O’Brien, who knows not the first thing about the game. Consider the following, from the commentary during Beckham’s debut, commentary at once amusing and infuriating.

Early in the second half, it appeared as though Chelsea had scored a second goal, but Brian Hall, on information from his Assistant Referee, called it back for an offside infringement. Smyth second-guessed the call, but the video reply showed that the scorer had indeed been offside—marginally—when the ball was played to him. Then Smyth, with his deep knowledge of the laws of the game, declared that you “..gotta give that to the attacking team..” in a game like this. Apparently he thinks that the laws are different from game to game, and should be subject to the whim of the referee. In Gaelic football, maybe, but not in our game.

O’Brien chimed in with his own encyclopaedic knowledge of the game when Beckham obviously did not like a call on handball. Our commentator: “Becks doing a little umpiring as well.” Well, as you may know, soccer did have two umpires at one time, before the game had a referee. They stood off the field, and made decisions when appealed to by the players. But as the game became more competitive and less gentlemanly, the lawmakers realized that all the stoppages for appeals slowed things down too much, so they named a referee, who eventually moved onto the field itself. But that was in the nineteenth century! Perhaps ESPN couldn’t find a newer edition of the laws for Dave…

So much for history. Now for understanding the mechanics of play. Smyth compared Donovan and Beckham, both of whom take free kicks, corner-kicks and serve crosses. Beckham’s abilities are legendary, and our Gaelic guru wondered whether Donovan would be supplanted when Beckham plays every game. To make his point, he noted that Beckham’s crosses curved away from the goal and therefore towards the intended target, whereas Donovan’s (after several examples in the game) curved towards the goal and therefore away from the target-man, making it more difficult for him to play the ball, or convert it in to a scoring opportunity.

What Smyth failed to notice was that the crosses Donovan made were from the left side of the field with his right foot, whereas Beckham has always been a right-side midfielder, making crosses with his right foot also. On this day, Donovan’s swung in, and Beckham’s would always curve away. If the players switched positions, then… Duh!

This game has been televised in the U.S. since the nineteen-sixties, and you’d think that by now you could find some knowledgeable commentators everywhere. But no, ESPN, which touts itself as the number one sports network, can do no better than to find a mellifluous voice with no knowledge of the game, and a simplistic color-man well past his sell-by date. But somewhere along the way, someone found Eric Wynalda.

He’s a former national team player, World Cup competitor and had years of experience playing in Europe. There was a moment after Beckham came on where Wynalda’s value as an observer became clear. The midfielder was going for a ball, but suddenly changed his stride and made a little skip, at which Wynalda explained: “…so as not to put full weight down…” on his injured left ankle. Only a player who has suffered a similar injury would understand that.

So in this feast for fans, we had lots to admire, some hints of what is to come, some amusement at ineptness, and a wish that ESPN would give Wynalda more mike time. And to think that the star in this exhibition was on the field for only twelve minutes.