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Look, I don’t like to spend too much time giving television networks advice on how to cover sport. Occasionally I’ll dip my toe into these waters, but usually my sports coverage counsel is restricted to tweeting about how James Brayshaw should be tried in the Hague.
But I feel compelled to offer a bit of a tip to Channel Nine, having just received the very very good news that next summer, in a move which should help keep the network on the cutting edge of the 1980s, their cricket coverage will include sports presenter Yvonne Sampson.
Now, this is excellent, Nine, good on you. I mean it’s a baby step, but it’s progress, and it is a positive development.
A bit of a shame you’re still resisting allowing a woman to actually call ball-by-ball action, but I guess after Channel Ten’s experiment with Kelli Underwood calling the football, which was abandoned due to pressure from a concerted lobby of big fat crybabies who claimed that listening to ladies’ voices made their ears hurt, you feel the need to tread cautiously.
As head of sport Steve Crawley says, a woman in ball-by-ball commentary “will happen, it’s just a question of when”, and it would be churlish of us to devote ourselves too fiercely to yelling, “Well how about now you foot-shuffling twat?”
But look. Here’s the thing, Nine, that you need to understand, and you can trust me on this, because I am an internet writer. If you’re going to have a woman on the cricket coverage, do it properly.
You know what I mean. If Sampson is not to actually call the action, but act in a hosting role, make sure she’s actually hosting coverage of a sport.
Make sure when she’s on screen she’s talking about cricket, about batsmen and bowlers and outswingers and cover drives and over rates and declarations and controversial Hotspot rulings.
If she’s interviewing people, make those people cricketers, or ex-cricketers, and make the subject of the interviews cricket.
What you do not want to do – and by that I mean, what I really don’t want you to do – is bring Sampson up to the commentary box and put her in charge of the kitten-down-a-drainpipe side of cricket coverage.
If the opportunity comes up to interview Nathan Coulter-Nile’s girlfriend, or the five guys in the crowd dressed as Pennywise the clown: well, first of all, turn that opportunity down; but if you don’t, don’t say, “Hey, Yvonne can do that, she is a lady!”
Don’t bring a woman into your Wide World of Sports, just to put her to work on puff pieces, celebrity plugs and presenting The Lighter Side of Tea Breaks.
Three decades ago, Nine made Kate Fitzpatrick a commentator on the cricket, a move which backfired both because she was neither a cricket expert nor a sports journalist, but an actress, and because she was treated appallingly by the Kerry Packer Old Boys’ Club.
One would hope that in 2014 we are considerably further along than in 1983. Progress, however minor, painful and insufficient, is being made in the promotion of women’s sport, and women’s cricket in particular.
This summer there’s been actual women’s cricket broadcast live on free-to-air TV, an unthinkable development when I started following the game.
A growing proportion of the population is following the fortunes of the national side, more and more players are becoming known to the public, and if the higher profile of a star like Ellyse Perry brings with it a slab of repellent and disheartening sexism hurled at her from the smellier reaches of the internet, we can at least take heart that these are the howls of a regressive minority protesting angrily at the fact they’re losing their sense of god-given superiority, and are thus a piece of proof in themselves the momentum is travelling in a forward direction.
Given that, Nine, you just have to keep going forward. Don’t make Sampson the designated giggler of the team. Don’t make her the WAG-wrangler.
Make her an important and equal part of the coverage, and make sure that she’s there to cover a professional sport, not to distract with ‘girls’ stuff’.
And if you’re not willing or able to do that, Nine, then please: just don’t bother.