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The Caribbean Premier League has to get competent radio announcers

Jul 23, 2015 Letters

DEAR EDITOR
I haven’t listened to cricket on the radio since I was a little boy. After many decades I decided to listen to the Amazon Warriors versus the Red Steel. It is the only cricket match to date that I have listened to after such a long time. I did not tune in to the other matches in the Caribbean Premier League (CPL) at the Stadium here in Guyana.
If people outside of Guyana were tuned in to the radio then Guyana’s image certainly took a battering. The radio announcers were far from plausible. Throughout that match, the announcers misidentified the batsmen. What was shocking was on many occasions the two batsmen were as dissimilar as a plate from a cup. Many times a white, foreign batsman was referred to as the Caribbean dark-skinned batsman at the other end of the pitch. Surely if the CPL is going to continue with those announcers then a telescope will have to be fitted out in the commentary box. Twice the Red Steel was referred to as the Tridents
But the one that took the cake was when one of the commentators confused two vastly different nouns – duplicity and duplication. My daughter was passing by the study door and I called her in immediately to tell her to listen, because the guy repeated his semantic nightmare. Here is what happened. The Warriors’ captain, Denesh Ramdin, put a fielder at silly mid off to take a catch when the batsman prods forward to a spinner. For those not familiar with field placements, that is when the fielder is right in front of the batsman. He can get hurt, so he dons a helmet. What the Warriors’ captain did, he duplicated the silly mid off position by putting a silly mid on position. It means there were two fielders very close to the batsman; one on his left, the other on the right.
In referring to the duplication process, the commentator said Ramdin was now trying duplicity on both sides of the wicket. He meant Ramdin duplicated silly mid on with silly mid off. And that announcer repeated his grammatical contortion three times. That was certainly a silly mistake. The two words have nothing in common.
Finally, I don’t look at cricket on the television when Darren Gough is commentating. That man knows only one word, “fantastic.” Once Gough is on the mike, every description, whether it is a catch, a stroke from a batsman, an unplayable ball from a bowler, a scene from the ground, a scene from the country, Gough uses one word only for his description – “fantastic.”
Can the owners and controllers of the CPL please give Mr. Gough a thesaurus? He will find dozens of synonyms for “fantastic.” I would offer a few – superb, phenomenal, elegant, extraordinary, magnificent, par excellence, brilliant, coruscating, incredible, pyrotechnical, mesmerizing, magical, unbelievable, unimaginable.
Frederick Kissoon

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