'He's broadast that like a tracer bullet'. PHOTO: AFP/GETTY
Row between Indian host broadcaster and BCCI leaves TV viewers without pictures – and then leaves them to the tender mercies of commentator Ravi Shastri and his BCCI-mandated cohorts.
British TV watchers were exposed to not one but two horrific alternate realities on Friday morning: a sporting life without TV; and the replacement of Nasser, Mike and company with Shastri, Sunil Gavaskar and Dermot Reeve.
Just a few minutes before the scheduled start of England’s ODI match at Hyderabad, it emerged that a bust-up between the BCCI and the Indian host broadcaster had seen the board withhold rights to show the match.
Sky viewers instead sampled the retro delights of David Lloyd commentating down a crackly phone line over a still photo of the deserted outfield. The forlorn sensation of a man howling into the void called to mind a Clubcall phoneline from the 1990s, or one of those 0898 numbers where a depressed middle-aged woman in a Rotherham call-centre tells you she has been a naughty schoolgirl for 50 pence a minute. With Nick Knight adding his thoughts in the background.
As if this were not unsettling enough, the telly box suddenly crackled into life in the fourth over – after God knows what ransom had been paid – just in time for Steve Finn to effect an athletic flick in his follow-through that sent PA Patel back to the pavilion, run-out at the non-striker’s end off a straight drive from his partner. But instead of the pithy insights of Hussain and Atherton, the capers of Lloyd or even – heaven help us – the familiar hell-in-a-handcart chuntering of Sir Ian and the prevaricating of Knight, British cricket fans received a vivid insight into life for their Indian cousins.
The relentless cheerleading of Shastri and Gavaskar for everything belched out by the BCCI is familiar to Indian fans, but is nonetheless a shock to the system for those Brits who don’t get to watch much of the IPL. Shastri’s trademark parade of clichés and pet-phrases, delivered in that slippery baritone, are a sure irritant. When paired with Dermot Reeve, they become unbearable. Bizarrely, Matthew Hoggard also popped up in a summariser’s role to claim that Finn’s bowling of a yorker had been “unintentional” and that the bowler had “missed his length by five yards.”
A morning of listening to what Indian fans have to put up with certainly puts one’s own viewing gripes into perspective. If only we could offload some of our football pundits onto them…
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