So while ESPN made it clear that its World Cup coverage this time wouldn't be led by U.S. announcers — only one of its eight game announcers, John Harkes, is an American — it was still bizarre Saturday when the U.S. team played its much-hyped opener against England and the lead on-air voice was … British.

"If there's a hue and cry over anything incomprehensible I said, then I can only apologize," Martin Tyler said in an interview after calling the USA-England tie.

There's no need. Tyler, calling his ninth World Cup, is a famed soccer voice available because his usual outlet, Sky Sports, doesn't have Cup TV rights in Britain. And after ESPN largely used U.S. announcers to make soccer sound accessible and not too foreign on past Cups, Tyler now leads a multinational on-air team that makes sense, given the USA is guaranteed just three games in the 64-game Cup.

But Tyler's Saturday assignment, after calling Friday's South Africa-Mexico opener, turned traditional TV sports on its head. It was as if, say, an Australian had called Michael Phelps' Olympic races for U.S. TV. Or maybe like having had a Finn or Russian, rather than Al Michaels, call ABC's 1980 Olympic ice hockey. (Miracles? Nyet!)

Tyler says he didn't say "soccer" — instead of "football" — because "that's not a word I use. … I felt I've been asked to do this for what I do, not what they want to make me do. And I haven't had anybody tell me to say this or that."

So he was an ABC/ESPN announcer — albeit working the game with Harkes, a former U.S. team captain — who had to remind himself not to root against the USA. "I felt my job was to be a professional broadcaster," Tyler says. "And that's what I did. It was no problem dealing evenhandedly with the teams during the game. It's afterwards that you feel emotions."

Tyler said English goalkeeper Robert Green, who spectacularly muffed a save to allow the lone U.S. goal, had "given away one of the softest goals you'll ever see at this level of football" to create "a catastrophe from England's point of view." Tyler's kicker: "To say it was a schoolboy error is unfair to schoolboys."

But, says Tyler off-air, Green is actually "a very, very good friend of mine. I haven't sent him a message yet. I don't know what to write. Wounds like that run pretty deep."

Tyler says he's trying not to "get into too much London vernacular" although he is not afraid to use "a few British-isms everybody knows."

Still, for Tyler, players don't lose the ball; they're "dispossessed." Seasons are "campaigns." And while even U.S. viewers who rarely watch soccer outside the Cup probably understand "nil-nil," you wonder what lots of U.S. viewers were thinking as Tyler noted club "relegation" in English leagues. (Have to look it up?)

ABC's overall coverage didn't play up national-rivalry angles, beyond touches like live shots of British and U.S. troops in Afghanistan watching the game together and erupting in a strange mix of cheers and cringes. Which was probably wise, given the role of England's biggest company in an ongoing American environmental disaster. (Not so Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert, who said of Saturday's game: "We'll finally have a chance to get back at those limey bastards for the oil spill.")

Tyler says he doesn't say "we" even when he calls England's team for the Queen's own viewers. But Steve McManaman, a former English Cup team member serving as an on-site ESPN analyst with Mike Tirico on Saturday, couldn't resist. After Tirico tried to give casual U.S. soccer fans a way to relate to Green's historic gaffe — suggesting the goalie became a Bill Buckner figure — McManaman offered U.S. viewers an observation they likely didn't expect: "If we're going to win the World Cup then we're going to have to play 100 times better than that." (Sort of a glimpse at what ABC might be like if the colonists' revolution had been quelled.)

ABC's coverage, using exquisite game footage from the Cup's world TV feed, had an excellent replay graphic to illustrate offsides calls and non-stop action that seemed almost un-American with its lack of TV timeouts. And ESPN studio analyst and ex-U.S. team member Alexi Lalas got supernatural assistance: "The gods of soccer have smiled upon the U.S."

But Tyler gave the U.S. team a bit more credit. Tying Britannia rather than being ruled by it, he suggested, "shows how far U.S. football has come. It's no longer a bunch of 'hammer throwers,' which is one of the expressions I grew up with." And U.S. soccer got nil respect.