Silence: Reflections on the lost art of cricket commentary

Richie Benaud understood what the audience wanted

These days, I long for silence. With every boundary, a bank is hurled at me and with every catch, a telephone network. In the age of spidercams, snickometers and stumps that light up, I wonder why there isn’t a button on my remote to make them all go still.

I want to listen to the sounds of the game. The effort of a bowler, the thud in his step and the sigh of his delivery. I want to cherish the sweet sound of leather hitting a seasoned willow, the pleading cry of a desperate appeal and the soulful symphony of an ecstatic audience.

I want to weave my own story, write my own script. I want to imagine the anticipation of a nervous batsman, give meaning to the shuffle in his step. I want to feel the heartbeat of a charging bowler, be part of his struggle to make it swing. The calmness of a captain’s mind and the stillness in an umpire’s stance – I want them to be details in my personal tale.

I want the voice to contribute. I want it to tell me of anecdotes that reveal, snippets that amuse and facts that enlighten. I want it to add richness to my characters and character to my plot. When the ball is cut to square, I can see.

Some sports need more speak

In Formula One, you listen to the commentary. The camera pans a car or two, but there are 18 others on the track. Somewhere there’s an overtaking manoeuvre, somewhere there’s a crash. Somebody gets into the pit lane, there’s a yellow flag on the third chicane, someone’s been issued a penalty and the safety car has just come out. The details are too immense to be captured on a television screen; you want the commentators to fill you in.

You want them to explain how long the soft tyres will last, what’s the trade-off in going for a three-stop strategy, which cars are better going down the straights and who just reported a problem with his DRS. In the Formula One experience, information is critical.

Cricket is a far simpler game. In cricket, you don’t listen to the commentary, you merely acknowledge it. The camera is fixed eternally on the action. The player is followed, the ball is tracked, and from the comfort of your living room couch, you have all the information you need.

It is perhaps because cricket originally belonged in the radio that far too much is said, when little needs to be. The radio had to paint a broader picture; to bring a stadium and a summer afternoon to life while describing the gallant effort of a rampaging Clive Lloyd. On a television screen, I can see the stadium and the summer afternoon.

Richie Benaud perfected the art of cricket commentary

Richie Benaud understood that you could stay quiet. His pause held the poignancy of what was just said, and the potency of what was yet to come. You could hear in his voice that he cherished the words that he said, loved the way they sounded. He could coerce unlikely words into poetic sentences and make the mundane sound lyrical.

“Late in the day, he’s a got a beauty through Kevin Pietersen,” he said of a Glenn McGrath delivery in the 2005 Ashes, and that was all. There was no needless exaggeration, no adjectives that had you reaching for the thesaurus. Yet in that moment, he captured the gravity of the cricketing moment, its importance conveyed in the cadence of his voice, and the dying summer sun.

You could listen to his commentary all day and he wouldn’t reveal at a single moment that he was Australian. There are no teams in cricket called ‘we’ or ‘they’, he once observed. He recognized his role as a narrator and he committed to it. You would seldom find him resort to the ‘back in my day’ references, an escape that must have come easily for one of Australia’s greatest captains and leg-spinners, and one that modern-day commentators indulge in far too often.

Today’s commentary boxes are too full of experts. We are constantly in awe of the legends of our sport. In our minds, which are so taken by their cricketing prowess, it is inconceivable that a batsman’s skill might not extend to a microphone.

They know the game, but its translation into words comes only in bits and pieces. They fumble for expressions, struggle for descriptions, and in their awkwardness, injure the beauty of an elegant cover drive and undermine the significance of a saved boundary.

A cricket match needs its narrators; men who can say an awful lot by saying nothing at all. They let us weave our own story, write our own script, but occasionally contribute with a helpful suggestion, a timely comment.

Commentators like Harsha Bhogle are a rare breed

Harsha Bhogle remains a delight in the commentary box. He cajoles an anecdote out of a reserved Rahul Dravid, orchestras a conversation with the fiery Sourav Ganguly, chips in with a line here and a comment there, but mostly lets the game do the talking. A consummate professional, seemingly always excited by the little delights of this sport, he remains proof that to tell a beautiful cricketing story, you needn’t have played a hundred Tests.

Sadly, we might have seen the last of his kind. In an odd interview given to GQ in 2010, now lost in the intricate channels of the internet, Bhogle was asked if there would ever be another him. He replied: “No. And not because there isn’t anyone good enough – in fact, you should be able to ?nd at least eight or 10 guys better – but because no one is willing to give them a break. I keep telling people there are two aspects to broadcasting: one is love of language; the other is knowledge of cricket. One has completely overwhelmed the other.”

Cricket should be fun to listen to. And it sadly hasn’t been for a while.