On Cricket Commentators

A very famous Marathi playwright once remarked that the value of anything that is said is determined not by the merit of the statement itself, but by the identity of its author. This is admittedly a pedestrian translation - the original Marathi is masterfully simple and lyrical. I hope you got the gist of it though, for this notion goes to the heart of the automatic legitimacy that "expert" commentators have.

These are usually ex-cricketers. What they say is considered valuable, purely because they bring with them the experience of having played the game.

Cricketer-Commentators have proliferated in recent years, especially since the advent of Cable TV. They come in all shapes and sizes, and represent all points of view. They are joined occasionally by non-cricketers, who must perform subordinate roles. Harsha Bhogle is the most storied of these subordinates and has become a respected voice in his own right. Mandira Bedi brings up the other end of the subordinates spectrum. The point of her noodle-strapped presence is all too obvious. Unlike Mr. Bhogle, she has no claim to being a journalist. But this post is not about these subordinate bit players.

It is about cricketing giants from yesterday posing as narrative giants of today's cricket. They deliver their olympian insights about the heat of battle from the cool confines of specially constructed commentary boxes at the Test Match grounds.

They participate in multi-national commentary teams, purporting to bring to us cricket in its best international flavors. Some of these commentators are truly great former players - Barry Richards and Sunil Gavaskar, to name just a couple. Some others among them have built their own personages anew as commentators. The strokeless wonder that was Siddhu morphs into an elegantly attired, loud, colorful bloviator, specializing in some truly unconventional cliches.

Expert Commentators broadly fall into three categories. These have nothing to do with their playing record. The only area where their playing record might come into play is in the richness and depth of their bag of anecdotes, but you'd would be surprised as to how little impact that has.

The first category is that of the commentator who seems to speak from memory all the time. They sit there in front of the game, watching it with all this amazing technology and statistical know how at their beck and call, and yet, seem stuck in their own narratives, which they repeat endlessly. It is almost as if it is irrelevant what's actually happening of the field. These are the commentators who tend to say the same thing about the same player over and over and over again, game after game, week after week, season after season. They also tend to speak a lot. These commentators seem to think it is their duty to speak ball by ball, producing dull mind-numbing monotony. In short, they show all the signs of being intellectually lazy, and seem plainly bored at having to watch cricket a lot of the time.

The second category is that of the commentator who seems to speak from a limited, but highly personalized database of cliches. Members of this type sound very interesting at first, but invariably end up appearing to be loud, truculent and confrontational. Of the three types of commentators, members of this type are most likely to completely ignore events on the field if they don't appear to support their chosen narrative of that day. Members of this group also tend to think that things were better in their day.

The third category is the most sparsely populated, and consists of commentators who actually watch the Cricket that they are commentating on, and see it before they say something about it. What they say seems to depend on what they see, and so, they tend to say less than their colleagues who belong to the two types described above. Because they bother to look out for what is actually happening, they tend to prognosticate less, and they also tend to find new ways of describing events. They are least likely to resort to cliche. It is not that they don't have a point of view. It is just that they seem to actually follow John Arlott's dictum of explaining the game to the viewer - the actual game in progress that is, not one which lies in the figment of their imagination.

The tragedy of it is, that this third, highly desirable band of cricket commentators are invariably paired with members of the first two tribes during commentary stints. As a result, Ii tend to watch international cricket on mute for the most part.