A Spectrum Of Commentators

During the ongoing Champions Trophy in India, Harbhajan Singh misjudged a catch and just when it looked that he would drop the catch, he somehow managed to hold the ball in his hands inches inside the boundary rope. Incidentally, two old foes Tony Greig and Geoffrey Boycott were on the air commentating. “Harbhajan Singh has got under the ball. Ooo…he seems to have made a mess of the catch…. I think he has dropped the ball…Or has he caught it?? Thank god, he…” said Boycott. “Harbhajan Singh has taken a blinder. One of the best catches one would have seen in the recent past,” screamed Tony Greig on the microphone interrupting Boycott. “But he made a simple catch look spectacular. Didn’t he?” yelled Geoffrey. “But he did manage to make it look spectacular,” argued Tony Greig with a chuckle.

Cricket commentators are a different species altogether. They come in all shapes and sizes-- their accent and use of words making them popular or unpopular. They always try to come up with something new every time around. Some fail while some of them do succeed in entertaining their listeners. The addition of females is the latest development in this fraternity. Commentators who talk sense are the most popular. Unfortunately, someone like Navjot Singh Sidhu who talks a lot with a handful of non-sense submerged into it also get popular. Let’s study the characters of these entertainers. To start with, people like Ravi Shashtri and Barry Richards stick to the happenings on the field and read the game wisely and hence, they give the listeners a better picture of the game. Their enthusiastic approach and smart analysis make them popular among listeners. Sunil Gavaskar, Ian Chappell, Harsha Bhogle and Sanjay Manjrekar also form a part of this group. Richie Benaud is one commentator who holds a special place for himself in the commentary field because of his great knowledge of cricket and composed voice. Then arrive the likes of Tony Greig, Mark Nicholas and Mike Haysman who have actually shifted their focus on making the art of commentary entertaining. These are the people who have actually made commentary an interesting job. They exaggerate events and tend to infuse fake exuberance into the listeners. Interestingly, their inspiring voices do tend to succeed in doing so. Cricket is after all a means of entertainment!

After all these men comes Geoffrey Boycott who is a die-hard fan of technique---be it batting, bowling or catching! If you ask him, someone like Sehwag is an ugly scar on the beautiful face of cricket. During India’s last tour to Australia, Sehwag played and missed quite a few deliveries outside the off stump. See what Boycott had to say. “This lad has got a rubbish technique. Even my mum would play these deliveries better.” When Sehwag played crunching cover drives on the next two Brett-Lee-deliveries, Boycott says—“Ha ha, this guy has made a mockery of what I told a couple of minutes before. He has got great hand-eye co-ordination. He doesn’t need any coaching book technique.” In the very next over, Sehwag comes out of his crease to a MacGill-delivery and gets stumped. Boycott says—“Just hand-eye co-ordination can’t take you too far in such a competitive form of the game, son. You need to learn quite a bit about batting. Crickeet is no child’s play.”

Then there is a whole bunch of other English commentators that includes David Lloyd, Ian Botham and David Gower. They have a special liking for their national team. If debutant Robert Key scores a century against a hapless West Indian attack, they start seeing him as a potential threat to Mcgrath and Warne in the next Ashes series. There is no cricket more important than Ashes for this group of commentators. And by the time Ashes ends, players like Robert Key are seen packing their bags with face-hiding batting averages of 15 in the series.

And then there is a man called Navjot Singh Sidhu who speaks nothing but non-sense. When he had initially arrived in the commentary field, he did a decent job with his catchy one-liners. But as time passed by, his one-liners became an overdose and irritating. In the recent one day game between India and England, England was bowled out for mere 125. During the break between the innings, when asked how much chance England had actually had, let’s see what he said---“England faces a deep, dark tunnel in front of it and it has no other option but to walk that tiresome, painful path towards the end of the tunnel where a slow, inevitable death with bright, cruel teeth waits for it. Sorry my dear friend, miracles are called so because they don’t happen too often. No matter how hard England flocks its feathers, it can’t escape defeat in this match.” When Charu Sharma asked the same question to Ian Chappell, he answered with his typical Australian flair—“I don’t know why Sidhu said so much about the probability of an English win. For me, the simple answer is zero.” Sidhu was embarrassed. Dean Jones has tried to give Sidhu a run for his money in the field of non-sense commentary and has succeeded to some extent as well.

Michael Holding is better known for his Caribbean accent more than anything else. “Adaam Gilchrist is playing just the kind of innings Australia wanted at this juncture” seems to be his favorite sentence. He is usually so obsessed with the pace quartet of the West Indies during the early 80’s that every other fast bowler looks mediocre to him.

Some commentators have special liking for some players. ‘Saurav Ganguly—the prince of Calcutta’ is Boycott’s favorite despite his horrible technique while Sachin Tendulkar must thank Tony Greig for helping him acquire semi-God status all over the world. Jacques Kallis owes Mike Haysman a can of beer for enhancing his popularity and Imran Khan always has a sea of praises for Younis Khan.

The two female commentators from South Africa seem to talk sense in the microphone. One can only hope that they would add a new dimension to commentary. People like Rameez Raja, Jeff Thomson, Arun Lal and L Shivramkrishnan don’t have anything special about their commentary skills to talk about. They are paid just because they know the game and speak a bit of English.

Commentator, as a group, surely form a nice spectrum with different colors in it.