Sky Sports is generally reckoned to have done a decent job replacing Channel 4 in covering the cricket in England in 2006. But, writes Peter Wilby in The Observer, when the occasion demanded expertise, their commentary team was found wanting.
The incident in question came at The Oval in August when Pakistan were accused of ball tampering and then refused to resume after tea, eventually forfeiting the match. Wilby was unimpressed with Sky’s main men:
They proved themselves utterly inadequate. They lacked even one person, a Benaud, an Arlott, even a Christopher Martin-Jenkins, who could bring journalistic qualities - an inquiring mind, a hunger for information, a desire to explain - to the occasion. They could tell us next to nothing about what was happening behind the closed dressing-room doors. More seriously, they failed to give the events any wider context.
Why were they so impotent? Wilby reckons that it was because they were all former players. Instead of drawing on their rich experience – and remember that the Sky team included several players who had first-hand exposure to ball tampering (witnesses to rather than perpetrators of, it should be said!) - they played safe.
As former star players, still deeply embedded in the game's culture, the Sky commentators rigidly observed its codes of omertà during that dramatic day at The Oval. In so doing, they failed their viewers.
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