Former Captain Ricky Ponting provided some information about Australia. Photo: Mike Egerton/PA
Ritchie Beno's golden rule about the key role of silence is not heeded; earlier the analyst was paired with the announcer, but quite often in this test it was a banjo duel. There is a wealth of gaming experience among the members, but the policy of changing a couple of big beasts every half hour sacrifices the continuity and control you get when a more experienced playcaller seasons with a guest.
In these looking glass days, perhaps a reassuring familiarity with The Test Match Special on the radio becomes its own. BBC TV stories certainly give you all the boundaries and wickets, but in an overloaded match of the day, you might end up frame by frame with out of context action rather than condensed, digestible narrative.
Something that Sky succeeded over the past few years is to address context or stories beyond boundaries; for example, here's Blue for Bob's Saturday coverage. A very bored Dylanologist, Mahler fan and Headingley hero of 1981, once shared an apartment with the man who was on the news this weekend, his high school friend and big buddy Martin Tyler, who was the last big guy of a certain age to leave Sky.
With the loss or departure of Willis, Botham, Shane Warne, David Lloyd, Michael Holding and David Gower, there has been a more technocratic bias in cricket coverage and perhaps a reduction in characters and personalities. The England cricket team lives in a brave new world, but the audience is still not comfortable with it all. We like to have a few familiar faces and voices to help heal Bazball-based ETSD; experts advise that it should take no more than half a century or so.
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