Filed under: Cricket, England Cricket, Tests, Australia Cricket
Midway through the last day of the first Ashes Test, after 13 sessions of wildly fluctuating thrust and parry, it was finally time to kick back and relax. Much of importance was still to occur: as Alastair Cook and Jonathan Trott flayed Australia's miserable attack hither and yon, batting records would tumble, and God alone knows what knocks their innings have given to Australia's, and especially Mitchell Johnson's, confidence. But in simple stark terms of the result, the Test was over. It was going to be a draw.There's nothing quite like the final sessions of a Test when everyone knows there won't be a result. The batsmen play a few strokes, trying to up their averages when the pressure's off. The bowlers keep it just tight enough without expending too much energy. The crowd drink far too much, and concentrate not so much on the game but mainly on mocking people who aren't there. ("Long to reign over yooooouuuuu," went the Barmy Army gleeful take on the national anthem, God Save Your Queen, to republican hosts who weren't there, home support being thin on the ground for the final day, after Cook and Andrew Strauss had slapped their side all over the shop on day four.) Meanwhile in the commentary box, the men with the microphones take the opportunity to dry-run some of their stand-up material. This Test would be no different.
Sky get plenty of stick for their sometimes ludicrously overblown - yet paradoxically lightweight - football coverage. But their cricket coverage is second to none. When the game's in the balance, the Sky team keep it serious. Nasser Hussain, Mike Atherton and Michael Holding explain the technicalities without ever patronising the viewer. Sir Ian Botham is the iconoclast, rarely offering opinions up for the sake of it (as he occasionally did in his early years as a broadcaster). David Gower plays to type as the ice-cool arch gent. Shane Warne explores the poker mindset of the top-class bowler. And while David Lloyd plays up to his Bumble persona for Chris Kamara-esque laughs, he does it while mining a deep seam of knowledge, a duality the wacky zany bonkers football pundit would do well to consider.
But midway through the final day, when it had become apparent the teams would be taking turns to bat out time, the commentary team kicked off their shoes. Esoteric freestyle jazz riffs became the order of the day. Bumble considered which Monopoly playing piece Cook would be. "What do you reckon?" he wondered aloud. "The fast car? The dog? The boat? He'd be the top hat." He then spent a good couple of minutes attempting to remember all three of the red streets on the board. "What is it? Trafalgar Square, The Strand... er..." Cook crashed another ball to the rope. "Fleet Street! And he's hit that one all the way back to Fleet Street."
Bumble wasn't finished. "Mrs Lloyd asked me for one of those i-things," began his bon mot. "An iPad or an iPod. I bought her an i-ron. Also gave her a large pile of shirts." The director cut to the box, where Hussain was caught quietly crying with laughter at Lloyd's leftfield ramblings, rubbing his eyes, his head banging on the desk.
Warne admitted to being practically speechless when England's score ticked past 500 for the loss of only one wicket. (And no wonder! Five hundred! One wicket!) Botham took the opportunity to rib the Aussie legend over the empty ground, the home fans having long given up on their team. "We have days in England when the crowd come in fancy dress. I see your lot have come as plastic chairs." This was the aural equivalent of prodding someone repeatedly in the chest, just to see what they'd do when they finally snap. Warne emitted nothing more than a good-natured sigh. The match was heading for a draw, but it felt like a victory for England, who had been on the ropes but came out landing haymakers, and Botham wasn't going to pass up the opportunity to rib his friend. Admittedly by now they were veering dangerously close to banter, but the lack of aggression, so often an undercurrent of football's coverage, was missing, ensuring the whole enterprise didn't veer off into tiresome laddishness.
In another dying rubber earlier in the week, Real Madrid deliberately got two players sent off for timewasting in order to wipe their disciplinary records in time for the knockout phase. In the Sky commentary box, pundit Garry Birtles went ballistic, creating a two-minute atonal soundscape centred around the word "disgrace", before melodramatically declaring that he "doesn't want Real Madrid to win the Champions League any more".
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Source: http://www.fanhouse.co.uk/2010/11/29/sky-cricket-ashes-david-lloyd-shane-warne/
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