Running Commentaries

Today was the last of my “cricket days” at Lords. India played a Flintoff-less England in the third of a best-of-three series of one-day matches, the first two of which England had already won. Wonderful weather, splendid company, lots of food (including Mr H’s rather eccentric blueberry bagels with smoked salmon and cream cheese), excellent Chablis from Mr B who was much concerned about the effect of direct sunlight on his sensitive skin, a superb spell of bowling by Harmison, fine batting from the “insouciant” (to quote Christopher Martin Jenkins) Ganguly, and an eventual (deserved) victory for the Indian team.

Following England’s unimpressive football performance in last night’s World Cup qualifier where a two-goal lead was equalled in the second half by a determined and unfancied Austrian team, it seemed almost inevitable that the cricket team would follow suit – not exactly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, but providing a disappointing end to what has been a great run of wins.

The Indian team, it must be said, played really well and their bowling (fast and slow) was really impressive. Like the Austrians who cheered their goal-scorers and lifted team morale, the surprisingly large crowd of enthusiastic Indian fans played an important part in encouraging a sense of team spirit so often lacking in English national sports.

But my issue-of-the-day is not about team spirit. It is about broadcast commentaries – the ways both good and bad in which sport, particularly cricket and football are presented through television and radio.

First, hats off to radio coverage of cricket. The Martin-Jenkins, Agnew, Blofield team have to keep up a non-stop dialogue regardless as to whether or not anything is happening on the pitch. They do it informatively, with humour, and a depth of knowledge about the game, its players and its past. They get side-tracked by shirt colours, buses, planes and, today, by the expression “a breathless hush”. They are terrific, and there is the added bonus of the Shipping Forecast interruptions and news of conditions in the mysterious North Uitsere, South Uitsere…

But then there is the awfulness of football coverage. I don’t mean the actual match commentaries which are often informative and worthwhile, but the dreadful, endless sessions with men in chairs pontificating about the finest details of the match, or the players performance both before the match, at half-time, and after the final whistle. On and on they drone. Breathtakingly pompous and arrogant, these know-alls seem to represent all that is bad in English Football – the back-stabbing, the organisational inadequacies of the game, the spending of extraordinary sums on players salaries and new signings, the sacking of managers whose teams lose successive matches, compared with the lack of attention to the games infrastructure, development of stadiums and top-rate facilities for spectators, the rearing of new English talent (easier to sign a foreign superstar), and the development of the game through schools and youth centres.

Oh, how I rant on. But more football on TV and less talking about football would seem a sensible idea.