OUT WITH THE NEW... AND IT’S IN WITH THE OLD...

Iwas thumbing through a list of ‘fake news’ items the other day, which included the Pope endorsing Trump for President, an unfortunate chemistry lab assistant in Florida blowing his nether regions into little pieces during a fart lighting experiment, and Kevin Pietersen accepting a lucrative offer to replace Andrew Strauss as chief executive of the ECB.

Actually, I made that last one up, but it just about fits the fake news criterion of being faintly preposterous, yet believable enough for some people to think it might actually be true. Into which category also falls the recent announcement that cricket’s return to the BBC will bring a fading sport back to the masses under a kind of emotional and unstoppable ‘Cricket’s Coming Home’ bandwagon.

“We are extremely excited to be taking cricket to the widest possible audience,” said the BBC’s director of sport Barbara Slater, followed by, from one of her predecessors, Roger Mosey, “It is unalloyed good news.” Deary me. There are several words that can be applied to these kind of utterances, the mildest of which would be tosh and poppycock.

Not even when Alastair Campbell was spinning faster than a tumble drier can such a generous interpretation have been placed on an announcement of a five-year deal to bring a selection of Twenty20 cricket to the non-subscribing section of cricket’s television audience, who will, for the first time, be able to see – live and as it happens – a pot-bellied middle-aged man in Row 23 take a blinding catch in one hand, without spilling a drop from the pint of ale in the other.

Of the 21 matches that have been hand picked to have cricket lovers all over Britain salivating in anticipation, ten of them involve a new and untested city-based domestic competition, and nine of them are women’s games. But let’s not get too nit picky. Maybe illuminated bails for the first time ever on the BBC, with perhaps the neat twist of a burst of ‘Jerusalem’ when they leap out of the grooves, will be the nick-of-time remedy the game requires.

This is not to say that something isn’t better than nothing when it comes to getting cricket – even the baseball version of it – onto terrestrial telly, but it’s hardly going to repair the damage done since the ECB flogged off the family silver – the value of which had gone through the roof after the best Ashes series ever – in 2005. That series was on Channel Four, not the BBC, and it’s probably fair to say that people’s memories of the time all cricket was on the Beeb tend to allow nostalgia to cloud some of the less brilliant aspects of the coverage.

Like the deal just struck, something on the Beeb was better than nothing, but what if this current Lord’s Test was on Auntie and not Sky? The camerawork would be hopelessly inferior, as it

It’s hard to imagine EW Swanton doing his best Tony Grieg impression when a batsman failed to trouble the scorers, ‘Goodnight Charlie!’

always was, and just when you’d have settled yourself onto the sofa for the Saturday afternoon session, you’d be whisked away to Wimbledon for some Serbian versus a Croat, or the 2.15 at Sandown Park.

The Beeb have never covered an England tour live, and not until 1990 were viewers able to watch, or at least those with satellite dishes, an overseas Test match live, ball by ball. That was in the West Indies, and Sky were rewarded with an unexpectedly close series.

Tetley put up £100,000 for an England series win, but despite the fact they could have insured it for around 30p, only a combination of the weather, some sharp practice from the home side, and an injury to Graham Gooch prevented them from collecting.

The BBC’s first ever cricket coverage was in June, 1938, when they were at Lord’s to bring Len Hutton’s 364 against Australia into the nation’s living rooms. Or some of it. Many of Len’s cover drives were only half way up St John’s Wood High Street when they vanished in a Bermuda Triangle like snowstorm of wavy lines, and an ear-splitting crackle.

Not surprising really. This was an age when newsreaders were obliged to put on dinner jackets to read out the day’s events, and viewers stood up when the TV went off air to the accompaniment of the National Anthem.

There was no cricket broadcast during the war, but it resumed again in 1946 with a tour from India, and was commentated on by John Arlott, EW Swanton and Rex Alston. Soon to be joined by Brian Johnston. The transmitters only allowed for coverage from Lord’s and the Oval, and it wasn’t until 1950 that coverage spread to Edgbaston, and 1952 to Headingley.

Colour arrived in 1968, highlights in 1971, and in 1999 the BBC’s home Test match monopoly disappeared when they lost out to Sky and Channel Four. And in 2005, just when an entire nation was talking about Flintoff, Pietersen, Vaughan and Hoggard, the ECB’s avarice sent the viewing figures from record levels to on a par with repeats of Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men.

There was, sometime in the 1970s, a brief flirtation with county cricket from ITV, but the independent channel never tried to occupy Beeb territory at the top of the food chain. They already knew from soccer that they couldn’t compete, as shown by the 1966 World Cup final. While Kenneth Wolstenholme’s ‘They think it’s all over’ secured a permanent place in British sporting lexicon, Hugh John’s description of Geoff Hurst’s hat-trick goal over on ITV vanished without trace.

Since then, television coverage has changed beyond recognition. The most dramatic leap coming from Kerry Packer’s Channel Nine coverage of the World Series. This gave us Daddles the Duck, assigned to tearfully accompany a non-scoring batsman back to the pavilion, alongside Tony Greig’s verbal send off. It’s hard to conjure up a picture of EW Swanton yelling into his microphone, when Sir Len failed to trouble the scorers, “Goodnight Charlie!”

Mind you, when the Beeb finally gets re-acquainted with live cricket via the T20 medium, it will be a whole new world for them after 21 years away. Maybe, they should compromise. By all means have the commentators yell “Got im!” “On Yer Bike!” and “oh, that’s enormous!” But make them wear dinner jackets while they’re doing it.