Here's to Mark Howard, the people's commentator

Mark Howard is on commentary dutires again.

I’m in the room on the other side of the house, separated from the living room where the television is, by a long hallway. Mostly I can’t hear it. The cricket is just a murmur; I can’t make out the words. But then a wicket falls and Howie’s voice squeezes into a sonic wasp that jabs me in the back of the neck.

I’ve found myself wondering about the man lately. He’s a newish voice to my ear, and given I’ve been watching cricket across two centuries, I feel I’m entitled to wonder if this newish voice is one that’ll be plaguing or pleasing me. Will this be a Rolls Royce like Richie Benaud? Someone you’d invite over, like Adam Gilchrist or Michael Hussey? Or someone you hold the remote for, like Mark Nicholas, with your finger hovering over the mute button?

It’s an important question, because in my experience cricket commentators tend to either pollute or grace our living rooms, and they tend to stick around for decades – which is a long time. We deserve to judge them. Anyone who intrudes for that long deserves to be judged.

So who is this Howie? And are there more of you, like me, who suddenly realised they’ve been listening to Howie for years and didn’t even realise?

The other commentators, even Shane Warne, seem to like Howie. He doesn’t hold a single objectionable opinion. He’s utterly inoffensive. He never says anything controversial. In fact, more often than not, he calls it with the type of language any ordinary punter would use.

(Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)

And should anything unusual happen – and cricket is a game in which unusual things seem to happen all the time – his voice contains distinctive notes of incredulity. There’s a whiff of bewilderment coupled with, if not condemnation, certainly wariness.

“Driving on the up to a ball that was on a good length” – the simplest observations are vested with it. It’s one of his hallmarks.

It suggests the man is reassured by things that follow a familiar course. Anything out of the ordinary in Howie-world, I believe, are dubious, perhaps even slightly unsettling. And for anyone striving for normality and plain, unabashed, down-to-earth simplicity that is a darn good thing. It feels right, correct, as secure as a shut gate.

And that’s why we seem to like him. Howie’s voice is a raised eyebrow to any kind of strange stuff. It wards off the weird. Don’t knock on his door unexpectedly. Don’t offer me a Midori. Don’t call a rum and coke something Spanish. Keep it all within the confines of normal, veering into banal.

Howie seems to dress well, but his defining feature is his voice: its steepling trajectory, like excess Gatorade ejected from the corner of Kyle Jamieson’s mouth on a drink’s break. The timbre of the man’s voice is up there with the squeak of a trainer on a basketball court or a set of tyres at the Indy 500 as a car rockets out of its pit box. It’s decibel heavy and abrasive to air.

I know, I know – what a tough gig it is being a cricket commentator these days. It’s a slow game. (Is it the slowest?) There are endless periods of attrition. And despite how inherently quirky and charming the game may be to aficionados, it still has to compete with genuinely quite exciting things on television for the advertising dollar.

Sometimes the game needs help. It must be played an octave higher. This is where Howie comes in. The exciting moments must be marked out. Granddad needs someone to wake him up in his chair. It would be unthinkable for an unshifting tone to mark out both mellow and melodramatic. You need a voice with revs.

Howie never weighs down proceedings with cumbersome technical language. It’s on of his strengths.

Howie isn’t offering his take on things to every possible cricket podcast or media outlet that exists, which is another strength.

But what insight does he actually provide? Ever? Most of the time – remember cricket can be slow – his commentary, and forgive me if this sounds harsh, is white paint on the wall of a second-storey hotel corridor. It’s nothing you reflect on.

To be fair, he’s not speaking much during the slow moments because the other commentators – usually former cricketers – are offering analysis and insight. Howie takes over when anything exciting happens – when the game is in fifth gear. The other commentators couldn’t be heard if they wanted to over of the screaming revs Howie employs for every wicket and boundary.

But that’s also why I’ve never noticed him before.

When a wicket falls I’m too busy studying the replay or basking in glory. When a catch goes down I’m wringing my hands. When the ball sails out of the ground I’m already animated or calculating Duckworth-Lewis-Stern in my head. I actually don’t need someone hyping moments like this.

This is why I’ve never noticed him before.

Maybe it was also because of all the cricket commentators you hear, year after year, he seems to be the only one who doesn’t work overseas. Why doesn’t he follow the game elsewhere? There are so many leagues. Don’t they value his revs? Is it a cultural thing? Are we the only ones who get him? And why doesn’t he write a column or offer deeper insights into the game?

Is Howie there to remind us that out-of-the-ordinary stuff is weird, to hype endlessly or to, as Ritchie used to insist, reveal what is not apparent from the, err, moving pictures?

Again, I’m not always in front of the TV. And I can’t afford to indulge and watch every ball of every Test, which means if a wicket falls and Howie’s on comms, I know when to run across the room (big), down the hall (long), across the kitchen (meh) and into the living room to see the replay of the wicket, six or dropped catch.

Here’s to the man with raised eyebrows and squeakiest pipes (I’m sure he doesn’t give a rat’s what I think) in world cricket. And cheers to The Roar, an opinion site inviting views on a subject as utterly worthless as this.