Lights! Camera! Action! - A list of improvements for cricket broadcasting

Changing the Press Conference

Press conferences are becoming redundant in sport. How long will cricket take to adapt?

While it provides the occasional laugh, the cricket post-match press conference is redundant. A player, usually the captain, comes out to address the press, who largely ask the same, hackneyed, boring questions, game after game. TV audiences have little to no idea of what the question is, but the sporting clichés the players recite, half in exhaustion and political correctness, make for extremely boring viewing.

Consequently, every news outlet has the exact same, tired soundbites processed and published after games. Whether in a tabloid newspaper, or on a serious cricket website, the information remains the same, and avid fans, who have probably seen the press conference on TV, get no new information from news sources.

The press conference has been done away with in the NBA, where journalists are asked to go and get their own sound bites, either from the dressing room itself or on the court. Not only does this make the process a lot more personal, but fans are exposed to the raw emotions of a variety of different players after a game.

Journalists choose the players they want to ask questions to, making for more intelligent, specific questions and answers and while people may regard this as an invasion of privacy, it is, at the end of the day, what the fans really want: to see their heroes as people, to understand what is going through their idols’ minds. Not only does it make for better news due to more specific questions, it also allows for a larger variety of articles due to a bigger pool of players giving sound bites.

In cricket, particularly in the sub-continent, players often fall into “superstar syndrome”, and a leading cause is that massive attention is given to one or two players in a team, often ones who are predominantly in the public eye. Dividing the press’ attention to all members of a team’s dressing room can only help in sharing the public adulation amongst the entire team.

Furthermore, T20 cricket, particularly the Big Bash, has allowed presenters to speak to players and coaches in the dugout during slow periods in a game, something that can add value to Test and one-day international cricket. This would give audiences the chance to hear a captain’s strategy during the game, drumming up interest, while not diminishing the class of the product.