The Rise of Thought
Paused by mediocre health, I turned to books to pass the days. One was a memoir of famed cricket broadcaster and writer, John Arlott, written by his son, Timothy.It was engaging for what it told about Arlott's personality and how he split it to accommodate his convivial public self and his egocentric private one.
I have never heard Arlott's commentary, though I have read his writing, as with Neville Cardus, the other tower. I think there are writers on cricket and there are cricket writers, a distinction between people who are writers who also write on cricket and those who write because they know cricket. Both men were writers, Arlott specialising in cricket and wine, and Cardus in cricket and music. They brought erudition to their prose, as well as analysis, humour and insight. It was literature, and I imagine their commentaries must have touched the same chord.
Cricket still produces excellent writing. Although as with everything else, cricket books are being churned out like flyers for fetes (some with equal meaning), a reasonably high proportion is worth reading.
I don't know that cricket commentary maintains the same ratio. From what I hear, it lacks depth so that over the course of a match, it becomes tiresome and banal. The trend has been towards using former cricketers as commentators, and I do think they add value through their intimacy with the game and players. Yet few are able to widen those parameters and bring a broader perspective.
Commentators from our region can be separated into two distinct categories. We have a proficient group comprising five or six members and another that exists far behind. Of the latter, few show signs of graduating to any another level. The commentary is full of childish banter, cliched descriptions, waffling and unnecessary histrionics.
These are not former players alone; this group includes several coming from within the bowels of journalism. The paucity of substance reflects the overall nature of most journalism, and really, it would not be fair to single out cricket commentators to say that they have fallen below the standards of their times.
Pondering that relationship -- the one between the commentators and their times -- all sorts of notions began circling.
Changing times have created different needs and modified tastes. In the life before television and the Internet was commonplace, radio broadcasts provided the only immediate access to the shape of a match apart from physical attendance. Thus, reportage was descriptive, and because computers could not provide immediate statistics and background, broadcasters needed to know as much as their scorers.
Today, not only is that information available online for broadcasters but also for the public. Television too has restructured coverage into entertainment packages delivering all sorts of sideshows in addition to broadcasts featuring any angle, speed and trajectory you could want to see.
Information today is designed to grab attention that has increasingly short spans.
The question I had been mulling was whether it was fair to say that cricket commentary of the past was superior. What if you were measuring based on its ability to meet contemporary needs and desires? Does current cricket commentary fit this profile? Has it mutated to suit its environment? Do listeners want more than they get? If John Arlott and Neville Cardus were to start their careers now, how far would they get?
The core question to me is in the application of the standards from one era to another.
To the specifics of cricket commentary, as much as I try to relate the function with its environment, it still comes up short. No matter how you look at it, it doesn't matter how you package information, unless it is done with intelligence, it will never go beyond basics.
Arlott celebrated the thinking cricketer and ardently wished for what he called the rise of thought. Neither would be out of place in his time or ours.