Commentators Are Monsters

And Umpires Are Their Prey

Jacques Derrida once observed that “Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: ‘here are our monsters’ without immediately turning the monsters into pets.” His point was that to be monstrous is to defy categorization and description by language. This resistance of monsters to description is evident in our modern word for showing something - demonstration. Monstrous things are things which lie at the edges of our comprehension, moral or otherwise.

On the face of it, cricket commentary seems to be a discipline dedicated to demonstration. Commentators are supposed to educate, enlighten, explain and entertain. There are some great ones who take great pleasure in doing all of these things and worry about things which they cannot explain satisfactorily. These are people committed to introducing the game to new audiences.

To be monstrous though, is not to be merely distant, foreign and unknown. To be monstrous is to be proximal and yet be at the edge of our moral comprehension. That is what constitutes a dreaded threat. Demagoguery consists of conjuring up such dreaded threats. It is the art of inventing monsters.

It is not my purpose to invent any today. My purpose is to demonstrate that at least in cricket and professional sport, commentators are monsters, and that within the closed system of a game, we can point to them and notice their fangs.

Apart from education, enlightenment, explanation and entertainment, commentators sadly have one other task which dominates all. This task is to commentary what batting and bowling is to cricket, while education, enlightenment, explanation and entertainment are like captaincy and fielding in cricket - people like to talk about these things but when the XI is picked, nobody in a competent team is picked for their fielding or leadership if they can’t bowl or bat first. This task is the capacity to attract and retain eyeballs and hold the viewers attention. Show business is an economy of attention.

Here, one has to pay heed to the dirtiest, not-so-little secret in show business - that the easiest, surest way to holding the attention of audiences is to inflame them. This essential fact of life has driven the methods of some of the 20th century’s most notorious figures from the old British press barons like Lord Rothermere, to ghastly purveyors of state propaganda like Goebbels, to world class profiteers like Rupert Murdoch, modern day propagandists like Steve Bannon. From the tabloids to the cable TV shout shows, the operating logic is that provoking old anxieties and nourishing new ones - keeping audiences inflamed and pandering to their prejudices - is a surefire winner at the box office. It does not matter if one is right or wrong, detailed or shoddy. There is no other measure of merit for the work itself.

Journalism is a discipline. There are ways to make a mistake in a report as a professional journalist which are unrelated to how well or poorly a report does as a product. Show-business has no measures of merit other than how much profit it produces.

Commentary is not a discipline. It is show-business. There are no measures of merit for what makes a good commentator. I might think that Ian Bishop and Simon Doull who are always impeccably prepared for the games they call, who study the players involved and are measured and thoughtful at all times in how they describe the action, are good commentators. But others may think that James Brayshaw’s proudly ignorant mateyness is good commentary because it is more entertaining to them. Still others might enjoy commentators who lose it on the air and get carried away in the moment - who wear their heart on their sleeve and are wealthy middle-aged passion merchants.

All three types of commentators are equally likely to get work as commentators. Commentary is not a discipline because it does not have any system by which it can distinguish between these differing claims about what is good commentary, let alone enforce any consequent standards. If Ian Bishop and Simon Doull had not been distinguished former international cricketers, they would have little chance as commentators simple for being studious and learned.

Few targets are as juicy and defenseless to commentators as umpires. Umpiring involves high expertise. Umpires are not only superb managers, their powers of observation and concentration, and their capacity to think with precision sets them apart from the average cricket enthusiast. They make decisions in over after over and are rarely noticed. Yet, the minute they miss an inside edge or fail to give an LBW which is subsequent shown to hit the top of leg-stump, its open season on them.

Consider this example below. The umpire gives the batsman out on the reverse-sweep (lets be generous and call it that). The umpire gets one look at it. The two commentators notice different things on that first look. One guy immediately says “Oh that’s close”. Shane Warne follows this with “he hit that didn’t he” (Warne, it turns out, is right). Then after a second look, they find that its an inside edge, and Warne goes off on “this umpiring”.

Brisbane Heat @HeatBBL

Oh my... HOW was this given out?!?! 😱 #BringtheHEAT #BBL10

As a few (like @sidvee below) have observed, this was poor commentary because it failed to explain what had happened and why it happened. Why might an umpire miss that edge in the flurry of movement of the batsman reverse-sweeping. Remember the bit about commentators educating, enlightening and explaining? From that standpoint this was an abject failure of commentary. Further, at first glance, the two commentators palpably saw the appeal differently. In this instance, Warne turned out to have been right. In other instances, he has turned out to have been wrong.

Siddhartha Vaidyanathan @sidvee

@cricketingview That one ball is nothing but match ka mujrim in miniature. The commentators haven't said one thing about the bowler or batsman or the type of ball or shot. They have simply zeroed in on the final event and vented. They are not informing the viewers of what happened.

But its worse than that. Warne turns it into an assault on “umpiring” in general. There is no basis for such as assault. The evidence of DRS suggests that batsmen and fielding captains are significantly worse at reviewing decisions than umpires are at giving them. The fashionable lament about “umpiring standards” is based on nothing. When pressed, the authors of such laments backtrack with “well, not at the Test level, but I’ve heard its bad at lower levels”. If umpiring standards really are to be studied, it would have to be done systematically, not ad hoc on live commentary. When commentators complain about umpiring they’re performing bad commentary.

If your average 20th century connoisseur of propaganda and demagoguery were ever to run a cricket team in a cricket league, the first thing they would do is to launch an all out assault on the umpires. Once the umpires have been thoroughly ridiculed and intimidated such that they fear for their well-being and the viewers think they’re useless idiots, the way would be clear for our propagandists to claim victory after victory. The umpires stand for everything the demagogue hates - rules, expertise, dispassionate observation, concentration, sincerity, integrity and fair-mindedness. Umpires are the sworn enemies of disorder, inflammation and conflagration. As managers of the contest, it is a basic part of their job to maintain good order. If an umpire loses control and the players get riled up, this is considered an umpire’s professional failure.

All this makes umpires inconvenient to commentary teams. And so, commentary boxes are often hospitable to excitable, immature ex-superstars who can get carried away with impunity because their motives are above suspicion to those who matter (the viewers) and their celebrity is valuable to those who count (the broadcasters).

It is not true that all commentary monsters are malign. Most are banal and a few can be quite wonderful. Occasionally, with Ricky Ponting or Michael Atherton or Rahul Dravid or Michael Clarke, there’s even the odd outbreak of cricket on commentary. The point though, is that there exist no mechanisms which guarantee that commentators who enlighten are more likely to get work than commentators who inflame.

And so commentators are monsters. Until commentary acquires some semblance of standards, until they are able distinguish good commentary from bad and encourage the former and banish the latter, and develop some measures of merit beyond celebrity and notoriety, they will all remain monsters. Sadly, presently they appear to have no incentives to change anything. Presently their survival is guaranteed by the fact that they can only ever appear to us as tame entertainers - pets. The umpires, and umpiring more broadly, are their prey. This plunder will continue until umpires perish.