Some New Year's resolutions for cricket's commentary teams

Expert

12th January, 2017

2490 Reads

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Ian Chappell contacted Spiro Zavos to give his side to a story. (AAP Image/ Nine Network)

Ben Pobjie

Expert

12th January, 2017

2490 Reads

A new year, although meaningless in any objective sense, is an excellent opportunity to trick oneself into the symbolic illusion of renewal, and therefore gird one’s loins for a fresh start.

With this in mind, let us all make a solemn vow, here and now, to make 2017 the year the sporting world gets its act together and rids itself of its more insufferable aspects.

Since we’re currently in the midst of a jam-packed, multi-format cricketing summer, let’s start with the grand old game. Specifically, the commentary box. Let’s really make an effort to get cricket commentators to talk properly again.

We begin with some simple remedial vocabulary work – teaching commentators by any means possible that some words and phrases are simply not to be used. For example:

a “cherry” is the mark a cricket ball makes on a cricket bat. Or sometimes, possibly, the actual ball itself. But while “ball” can mean both the physical ball and the delivery, “cherry” cannot. A good ball is not a “good cherry”.
a “heavy ball” is a good description of a shot put. It is never, ever, ever a good description of the delivery of a cricket ball. Do not say that a bowler “bowls a heavy ball” – they are all using the same ball. They might bowl it faster than others, they might hit the pitch harder, but they do not add weight to it.
While you’re avoiding “heavy ball” to describe a fast bowler, why not go the whole hog and stop describing that bowler as having “wheels”?
if you think a bowler is bowling too much towards the legside, say so – don’t say they’re bowling “too straight”. It sounds stupid, especially so when a bowler pitches a metre outside leg-stump and the commentator says, “That’s too straight” as if “straight” has now become synonymous with “wildly divergent from the intended direction”. Which it hasn’t. Because it means the opposite of that.

Avoiding problem words is important, but it’s not all about the words themselves: it’s also about retraining the – what I’ll call for the sake of argument – experts to stop expressing certain thoughts, no matter how they phrase them, in order that they should avoid making complete idiots of themselves.

Hopefully this can bring about a return of the good old days when commentators only made partial idiots of themselves. Therefore all callers should refrain from:

saying that batsmen trying to bat time to save a game need to play their natural game. They do not. They need to stay in as long as possible and eliminate risk from their game. Unless that’s their natural game, they really need to change their natural game into one more appropriate for the circumstances. Nobody says that a defensively-minded player faced with a ten-an-over chase needs to “play his natural game”, so don’t tell me that David Warner should keep hitting lofted cover drives when he’s 500 behind with a day to bat.
saying that a ball that did not hit the stumps was too close to leave, or that the batsman enacted a poor leave. A ball that is too close to leave is one that is going to hit the stumps. A good leave is one played to a ball that misses the stumps. This is a matter of physics.
talking about reverse swing unless they actually know what it is.

The next stage of the commentary re-education camp should deal with memories, and the allowing of same to excessively infect one’s assessment of the play.

A single anecdote, for example, should last no longer than one over. An easy way to remember this, if you’re a commentator, is that when the ad break arrives, it’s time to stop talking about whatever happened to you fifty years ago.

If the purpose of your anecdote is to have a big snorty chortle at the expense of one of your colleagues, then this rule can be amended: it should last no longer than one ball.

Beyond old war stories, it’s important that a commentator uses their vast experience in the game to provide intelligent insights that enhance the experience for fans, rather than using their vast experience to whine like a jealous teenager about modern players and how they never do anything right.

Yeah, I’m talking about Ian Chappell. Get off your high horse, old man: you only won half the games you captained in and your teams scored at less than three runs an over.

And you and your pal Warnie can stop calling for every captain to declare as soon as they get fifty ahead – not every captain is, as Warnie so frequently and stupidly says, “willing to lose to win”. Some would rather at least tip the odds in their own favour.

Lastly, it is time to find a way of forcing commentators to talk about the cricket.

If you’re on Channel Nine, this might involve cutting back on discussions of favourite foods. On Ten, maybe less banter about shirt colours (and stop trying to get Andrew Symonds to join in your little comedy skits – he doesn’t want to).

On both commercial networks, it’d also be nice to get commentators to stop pretending they’re excited about upcoming programmes on the same channel, but I recognise this might be a bit much to ask.

Could we at least ask them to watch a few minutes of the shows they claim to be so looking forward to?

On ABC radio, we don’t have to worry so much about cross-promotion, so it’s more just a matter of getting everyone to keep their discussions of what movies they’ve seen recently and where they went to dinner last night to less than fifteen minutes at a time.

I know none of this will be easy. I know it will probably take intense electroshock therapy, and in the case of Nine’s older commentators, removal of certain portions of the brain. But it has to be possible.

A fresh start for 2017. I’m sure that with goodwill on both sides, we can make the sound of summer slightly less ruinous to the sight of it.

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Ben Pobjie

Expert

Ben Pobjie is a writer and comedian whose promising rugby career was tragically cut short the day he stopped playing rugby and had a pizza instead. The most he has ever cried was the day Balmain lost the 1989 grand final. Today he enjoys watching Wallabies, Swans, baggy greens, and Storms.