What was Friday’s most impressive sports performance?
Walker Buehler striking out 10 batters in Game 3 of the World Series to help the Dodgers go up two games to one on the Rays?
Graham Mertz throwing five touchdown passes in No. 14 Wisconsin’s season-opening rout of Illinois?
Katherine Kirk shooting 7-under-par 65 to surge into fifth place at the LPGA Drive On Championship?
All very nice, but no. The honors go to Andrew Pickering, who put on a show for the ages in Italy, where Sassuolo and Torino played to a 3-3 draw, with five of the six goals coming from the 70th minute on.
Pickering was not on the pitch in Reggio Emilia, a northern Italian city between Bologna and Parma, but providing the English commentary for Serie A’s international video distribution. And to hear Pickering describe the action, if you closed your eyes, you would never know that he was calling the action through a fog so dense, it was hard to see the ball.
It wasn’t quite a 1988 Eagles-Bears playoff level of fog, but still, to be able to follow the action of that game and see where the passes are going, and that shots are heading into the top corner of the net and not wide… that’s just some amazing work by Pickering.
For the record, Pickering’s own frame of reference isn’t the Eagles-Bears “Fog Bowl,” but the 2006 fogfest between Stoke City and Coventry.