Sky or ? Technical excellence or enduring appeal? It all comes down to taste: do you want Hussain’s analysis or Boycott’s anecdotes?
Alan Tyers31-Aug-2008
Pundits from Sky: The technical side of the Sky commentary is spot on © Getty Images
Five days in front of the telly and radio: smashing. Missing out on going to the Lord’s Test: shame. However, I manage to recreate the HQ experience by getting the curmudgeonly old gentleman who lives downstairs to sneer suspiciously at me on my way into our building. This partly makes up for my failure to persuade a surly 18-year-old to search my shopping on the way back from Tesco’s and accuse me of attempting to manufacture a dirty bomb from a four-pack of John Smith’s and a tube of Pringles.Sky TV is in full effect from 10am, giving me plenty of time to search in increasing frustration for the audio commentary on the BBC website. Among the podcasts and webchats I finally find it and settle back for that most enjoyable sensory summer overload: the Test Match Special versus Sky sound clash.A rather wooden Shaun Pollock is on the telly, making his debut. He is purveying just the sort of hard-to-pin-down, play-or-leave-alone material that made his bowling so probing. When he pops up on the radio five minutes later there is cause for serious alarm. I bear no ill will to him, but surely there must have been more than one South African available for work this summer? Good grief, both the BBC and Sky are slap bang in West London – home from home for thousands of South Africans. In fairness Pollock improves by the hour throughout the Test, notably when greeting Kevin Pietersen’s ton with a dry “what a find he’s been for England”.Polly is the only addition to the Sky commentary team, with Bob Willis still kept in the attic like an unpredictable great uncle who has not been the same since the second dig at El Alamein. Thankfully they still let Bob out at 8pm sharp to chew on the day’s play and Charles Colville.In the manner of your mum trying to set the video CMJ gamely reads out all the different ways one can enjoy the cricket on the BBC – audio this and digital that and podcasts the other. Any way you like, in fact, other than actually watching it. Alison Mitchell says she will be doing something called micro-blogging on the website. I follow it avidly for five days, feasting on such tidbits as:4.40 pm England Rugby World Cup winner Mike Catt is socialising in the Coronation Gardens
4.44 pm Wonder if Catt supports England or SA at cricket?Could this be the saddest diary since Anne Frank’s? Still, the corporation’s obsession with interactivity and witless webbery is hardly peculiar to the cricket. Why won’t the BBC play to its strengths? One such strength is obviously the news coverage. Sample TMS lunch break from Lord’s: an interview with the ICC chief executive, Haroon Lorgat; a reporter up in Manchester covering the hearing over Yorkshire’s ineligible Twenty20 player; county scores; a phone chat with Peter Chingoka of Zimbabwe Cricket and another with Graeme Labrooy of the Sri Lanka Cricketers’ Association about their players playing in the IPL rather than Tests here in 2009. It is proper news coverage, as you would rightly expect from an organisation of the BBC’s might.With the Test coverage, Sky have broken the stranglehold of football’s “My mate Reidy” school of punditry, whereby the expert summarisers are so in bed with the players and managers under discussion as to make their observations meaninglessOver on Sky two nice men from Dukes (one of whom is Bob Taylor) are explaining to David Gower how they sew the seam on to the balls. It brings back childhood memories of programmes like Why Don’t You? and school holiday mornings ruined by educational televisual tours around corned beef plants.The technical side of the Sky cricket punditry is, to my mind, absolutely spot on. Compare Michael Holding, for instance, analysing Morne Morkel’s delivery stride in forensic detail with, for instance, football pundit Jamie Redknapp opining: “Well, he’s hit that beautiful, a top, top strike from a top, top player.” The cricket producers have grasped the concept that viewers do not need to be told that an object is in motion when they can use the evidence of their own eyes.With the Test coverage, if not the Twenty20 coverage of Wardy ‘n’ Crofty ‘n’ Knighty, Sky have also broken the stranglehold of football’s “My mate Reidy” school of punditry, whereby the expert summarisers are so in bed with the players and managers under discussion as to make their observations meaningless. Hussain, Atherton et al are firm but fair, and in David Lloyd they have an ace – a genuine personality, a unique voice. Ditto Holding. Sir Ian tends towards “how many Test wickets did you get?” browbeating, but he is, after all, Botham.Aside from the technical stuff the real difference between Sky and TMS is highlighted in the “batsmen: check; umpires: check; fielders: …buh?” incident when the crowd boo Graeme Smith for (and it pains me greatly to say this) something that was not his fault. The TMS team drolly wonder if South Africa are going to refuse to emerge and thus secure a draw, chortling “Where’s Darrell Hair when you need him?” Over on Sky they are ramping up the undeniably juicy but essentially bogus, controversy angle. It is sporting coverage versus entertainment.If Sir Ian hectors, not-quite-Sir Geoffrey positively Achilles-es. Boycott is now, I would suggest, completely off the reservation. The slightest squeak from Mark Pougatch (making his TMS Test debut) seems to rile the Greatest Living Yorkshireman into flights of indignant scorn. A perfectly reasonable suggestion from Pougatch that the return of Andrew Flintoff might increase the pressure on the run-shy Tim Ambrose (in favour of a keeper who can contribute with the bat) prompts hoots of derision from Geoffrey: “What, is Flintoff going to keep wicket now as well?” Five days of this bullying; Christ knows what Pougatch has done to him.The relentless monomania of Boycott has taken him so far beyond the realms of parody that even Rory Bremner – who pops into the TMS box for a chat and some of his cutting-edge impressions of man-of-the-moment Murray Walker – might have to stop doing him soon. It sometimes appears that Boycott is playing a sort of version of Mornington Crescent whereby he finds the shortest route back to “Geoffrey Boycott” from any question.
Boycott and CMJ: there is an undeniable chemistry between the disparate personalities in the box © Getty Images
One especially lengthy soliloquy sees Boycott defending himself against accusations of miserliness (seriously, I am not making this up) by recounting how he once gave a cab driver a hundred quid tip for returning a mislaid bag. As the anecdote enters, or so it seems, its fourth or fifth hour, a kind of furious snuffling can be heard in the box. Bill Frindall, for it is he, will be denied no longer. “I cannot believe you have yet to ask me when was the last time England made 500,” he whines. The overall effect is a bit like being trapped in a school for exceptional children.However, there is an undeniable chemistry between the disparate personalities in the box. With the increasingly erratic Blowers apparently orf at a wedding, the charmingly otherworldly/shambling amateurism quotient is reduced to palatable levels. Phil Tufnell, an amusing and surprisingly incisive acquisition, even dares to giggle about the sacred cakes, iconoclast that he is, if someone who has been on both I’m A Celebrity and A Question Of Sport can be thus described.The sole unwelcome visitor, for me, is Alec Stewart, who happens into the box at 5pm on at least two days, apparently mainly to talk about Matt Prior. Is there not a rule about product placement on the corporation? Should a BBC wonk not be interjecting “other wicketkeepers are available”? It falls to Pougatch, on Monday, to point out that Alec works for the company that represents Matt.For all of Sky’s technical excellence and trenchant, expert analysis it will never quite capture the enduring appeal of TMS, the back beat of the British summer still. I suppose it comes down to taste: do you want to hear Nasser on the umpire referral system or do you want to hear an anecdote from Mike Selvey and Jonathan Agnew about going out for dinner with Roger Lloyd-Pack (the chap who played Trigger in Only Fools and Horses) and being surprised by the tiny size of his suitcase? It was, or so Selvey and Aggers revealed to the nation, “no bigger than that of Paddington Bear”.