Sport spoken softly
Having never played the game at school – in Durham it was strictly a football sporting upbringing – beginning my cricketing education in my 20s meant looking to other sources for information.
Like fly fishing, which I dipped into around the same time, the level of patience involved in the sport make the actual moments of genuine excitement seem even more vital and rewarding – but what was it all about?
It was around this time that I discovered Test Match Special.
As a copywriter, the language of cricket had more than enough quirks to send me grasping for my notepad in excitement. Gullies and silly points, googlies and leg breaks, night watchmen and tail-enders. It’s all great stuff.
But when you add Test Match Special (or TMS to the affiliated) into the mix, the wordplay really climbs up a notch. It becomes compelling.
The commentary personalities may be the result of public school upbringings, but you don’t have to have played polo at Eton to enjoy it. In the 2005 Ashes series I remember a surreal 10 minute critique on window boxes at nearby flats, when the game took very much second billing. Why say there’s bad weather on the way when it could be put as eloquently as there seems to be inexorable clouds rolling in.
This leads us aptly into another magical element of TMS; the regular intermissions of the Shipping Forecast. These diversions are filled with curious names like Biscay, Viking and Cromarty, each conjuring up evocative images of tough life at sea. Copywriting nirvana.
I think I am will forever be a TMS fan first and a cricket fan second. It’s a place where the English language is allowed to breath, and the audience is never spoken down to.
Commentary for my winter sporting other lady has been dumbed down to such an extent that a three day old baby can now buy into the Premier League product and its related franchises. All passion, but no soul.
TMS is commentary perfectly in tune with its subject matter. Test cricket is, after all, a taste to be savoured rather than knocked back. In a sport that affords the spectator time to think, Aggers, Blowers and CMJ offer language to provoke thought.
Which is why I will blissfully continue to follow a game I don’t fully understand for literally days on end, safe in the knowledge that the company will always be worth listening to.