BT prove Sky’s not the limit
THERE was some unanticipated drama at around 1am when Graeme Swann and his wife seemed to be having a bit of a domestic about whether he’d actually taken out a BT Sport subscription. She’d messaged him about this but it turned out that he had. ‘Love you Sarah. Sorry about that,’ he declared over the airwaves.
This was not the only welcome new dimension in those attritional, rather austere early hours. Matt Smith, who has moved from football to Ashes anchor, revealed with unflappability and self-assurance what cricket presenting looks like when someone other than sporting royalty gets a go.
In the style of the BBC’s Mark Chapman, Smith put questions which the greats would perhaps have considered a little beneath them when gathering around the regal David Gower in a Sky Sports studio. ‘So James Vince needs to dominate now, not Joe Root?’ Smith suggested at tea. And the Test legends had to agree, as they clustered, in quintessential BT-style, around a popup counter on the Gabba outfield.
Alison Mitchell was designated a much smaller pop-up counter, though her style and depth of knowledge made this a substantial stride for sports broadcasting, as she became the first woman to commentate on the men’s Ashes. Only one of the commentary-box pairing of Mitchell and Geoffrey Boycott could lay claim to more than 100 hundreds but he was so delighted by the attrition going on that he could not get beyond it.
‘You love a good leave, don’t you Geoffrey?’ Michael Vaughan put it to him, after Joe Root had let one go. ‘Yes,’ Boycott replied, wistfully. Mitchell had substantially more to say than this. When she and Alyssa Healy, of the Australia women’s Ashes team, flanked Ricky Ponting in the mid-afternoon commentary box, we certainly seemed to be embarking on a journey.
Somehow, the stump mic seemed to have more clarity too, though it was no louder than usual. It’s not on delay either so, as always, the industrial language of every sledge is heard and the broadcaster must apologise if the air turns blue.
But it was hard to forget what had been left behind. One of the rituals of these occasions is Ian Botham, down on his haunches, digging his biro into a fault-line on the track. What we witnessed instead was Adam Gilchrist standing out in the centre, trying to coax Boycott into some talk about the surface as the camera moved up and down a bit.
‘How far would your spikes go in on a first morning at the Gabba, Geoffrey?’ Gilchrist politely asked Boycott, displaying a deference unknown to the England side he helped smash in 2001.
‘I hope in the dressing room they’re not talking about scoring rates,’ Boycott replied, not terribly interested in this question.
Gone, too, was the commentary box ‘Third Man’, where we have grown accustomed to any one of Michael Atherton, Nasser Hussain, David Lloyd, Simon Hughes or Michael Holding highlighting a technical point we’d never thought of, across the course of the past 15 years or so. Anchorman Smith took up the Third Man’s chair in the first hour, looking on rather awkwardly as Vaughan and Swann did their stuff, but then it lay vacant.
The inimitable humour of David ‘Bumble’ Lloyd was replaced by banter, central to which was the question of who would be first to enter the waters of the Gabba pool deck. Vaughan had apparently told Ponting to take his top off and ‘get his Speedos on’. ‘Punter’, as they call him, is less than keen.
Of those gravitating from radio, only Mitchell seemed to grasp the notion that less is more when it comes to TV commentary. Moeen Ali would win ‘the facial hair competition in the England dressing room,’ Swann told us. Nathan Lyon’s hand is frequently raised after a delivery as if to say: ‘Someone love me. Someone touch me,’ he said. Yes. Less is more.
You knew that Sky would have illustrated the perennial discussion about the uncommonly invariable bounce by digging out clips from previous first days of a Gabba Ashes Test. And that Alastair Cook’s departure would have elicited clips of him similarly waving his bat a foot in front of his pads like a wand. It took some time before the flaw behind his dismissal was actually highlighted at all, by Boycott.
These are early days for the new broadcaster. But what the first of them provided above all was a reminder of the extraordinary standards Sky Sports have set in cricket broadcasting down these years. And how, in Atherton and Hussain, it has provided two of the outstanding sports broadcasters of our time.
It was hard not to grieve a little when Lloyd, asked on Twitter earlier this week whether he would be tuning in to this series, replied, with that comic taciturnity which so endears him to many: ‘Wireless for me.’
What a loss.