BERLING, BRESMAN AND CHANDRAPAUL

May 17, 2010 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

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It was about four-o-clock on the morning of December 14, 1960.  I was sound asleep having read a “Biggles” book until midnight.  My father kept shaking me and I eventually tumbled out of bed, rubbing my eyes and complaining, “What happen?  Thief come? The house burning down?”
It was nothing as drastic as that but something much more momentous.
My father was sitting in front of our massive “Pye” radio listening to the West Indies play Australia at Brisbane.  It was the last over of the match.  Mike Coward, an Australian sports-writer, describes it, “The final over by the indomitable, charismatic Hall has claims to being the most fantastic ever bowled in Test cricket. Australia, now in pursuit of six runs, lost three wickets in seven deliveries.
“While there was a succession of defining moments, it was the seventh delivery that has become such a part of the rich lore of the game.  With the scores tied, Ian Meckiff tremulously waited for Hall.  Meckiff received a ball pitched in line with middle and leg, and played it towards square leg and ran.  Joe Solomon moved swiftly to make a clean interception, and with just one stump to aim at threw down the wicket.  After 83 years, a tied Test.”
Many years later when I saw the film footage of that last over it was exactly as I imagined it.  The radio commentary was so good that it was as if I had already seen the match. This is the power of radio – it caters to the imagination.  Good radio commentary not only allows you to see the game in your mind’s eye but enjoy the nuances, the interpretative elements, that television does not entirely communicate.  It is vivid and personal in a way that television cannot capture or convey.
When I look at some of the old matches on television, even though I never saw them before but only listened to them on the radio, the footage only confirms what I already saw – the great shots and catches, the fast bowlers running in, the guile of the spinners and the beauty of the grounds – Lord’s, the MCG, Eden Gardens and, for a long time, Kensington Oval.
A few years ago, an Australian cricket fan (and Professor of Media Convergence at a U.S. university), begged me to take him to see the Queen’s Park Oval.  Like me, he had grown up with radio and remembered the famous line “the sunlight scintillating on the hills” and Collie Smith’s theory that the mountain-setting is what caused the ball to swing so much at the Oval.
Sadly, those golden days of radio are now no more.  The last of the greats, in fact, the greatest of the great commentators, John Arlott, died on December 14, 1991, exactly 31 years after the historic tied-test.  Was it coincidence or is the great all-seeing eye above a cricket fan with a sense of humour as perverse as the rainfall in Guyana?
Wikepedia says, “Arlott was a popular commentator partly due to his gift for poetic phraseology. The BBC commented that ‘the style of commentary owed much to the poet in John. He would relish the phrases he used to describe what he saw and leave his colleagues wishing they could have thought of them while Wisden  wrote: ‘it is his unique gift for cricket commentary which will bring him lasting fame… His commentary technique was strongly influenced by his poetic sense. With the economy of a poet he could describe a piece of play without fuss or over-elaboration, being always conscious of its rhythm and mindful of its background.
He was never repetitive or monotonous, except for effect. The listener’s imagination was given free rein.’  One comment often noted was made in 1975, to describe a shot by Clive Lloyd as ‘the stroke of a man knocking a thistle top off with a walking stick.’  On England’s 1948-9 tour to South Africa, the England captain George Mann was bowled by his namesake Tufty Mann.  Arlott memorably described it as ‘a case of Mann’s inhumanity to Mann’.”
Speaking of man’s inhumanity to man, there is no more appropriate an example than the commentators that the Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC) has unleashed on us.  One of them spoke of a fieldsman “elongating himself to the left”.
They never say, “The batsman comes forward” but prefer “Forward comes” whoever.  It is stilted and causes me (and my 11-year-old son) to grimace every time we hear it – and that is often.  It is tough listening to commentary which does not give you a sense of the field setting or the drama of the game but hear, instead, the hollow “It’s all happening here etc” without an adequate description of what “it’s all” about.
The CMC team is also particularly bad with names – “Chandra-paul” instead of “Chander-paul” and “Bres-man” for “Bres-nan”.  The English all-rounder might be a Bres-man but that is not his name.  I always thought that “Irie-land” was Jamaica and that Ireland is pronounced “IRE-land” but clearly the CMC believes that everything is Irie with their commentary regardless of pronunciation.
Brian Johston, another of the greats, said in his autobiography “It’s Been A Lot of Fun” that apart from the fact that many Asian players look alike so you have to study the way they run or what they look like from behind, there is the formation and pronunciation of their names.
Many moons ago, when I studied journalism at Carleton University (the alma mater also of Tony Cozier, the only one left who does not make the description “sports journalist” an oxymoron ), we got an automatic “F” if we misspelled or mispronounced someone’s name.
The CMC team would flunk out not just on Bresman but on names like Gambhir which they pronounce as “Gam-beer”.   The fact is, if you don’t know, ask.  Any of the Indian commentators would have been happy to help.  Now that Sri Lanka’s in the final against Bresman and his bunch, and Afridi and his team are up against Australia (with Nannes or is it Nannies?) it might be good for the CMC guys to get a lesson from Tony Cozier in research, communication and getting the names right.
“Kieswetter, the name of the English wicketkeeper batsman, is pronounced “Keys-wetter” and not “Kai-sweater”.  His choice of outer garment is his problem but not his name.
However, there seems no way of stopping one with a sometimes pseudo-English accent who pronounces “Bowling” as “Berling”.  I have heard of communication gaps, but this is a Berling Wall.
This is why I deliberately picked up my two Brian Johnston books – the second is “Rain Stops Play”,   a collection of anecdotes.  “Jonners”, as Johnston was called, had no problems laughing at his own mistakes.  He admitted that in one game he welcomed listeners with, “Ray Illingworth has just relieved himself at the Pavilion End.”
He made it worse with, “Welcome to Worcester where you’ve just missed seeing Barry Richards hitting one of Basil D’Oliveira’s balls clean out of the ground.”  The only thing he advised at which the CMC team is brilliant is that if you’ve said anything outrageous by mistake, never stop, never apologise and never try to explain what you’ve meant.
He quoted the story of an American sports reporter who said that Arnold Palmer’s wife was so superstitious that “before every championship match she used to take Arnold’s balls in her hand and kiss them.”  That is not what got the commentator fired.  It was when he hastily added, “His golf balls I mean.”
*Tony Deyal was last seen asking if Mrs. Palmer kissed Arnold’s balls before every match, what does Mrs. Tiger Woods do with her husband’s?

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