Keeping Score

I was watching a soccer game on TV the other day and was finding the commentary somewhat dull. It felt as though the pace of the commentary did not match that of the game. Then I switched to a Spanish language channel and things changed immediately. Though I could not follow the language, it seemed more in tune with the game than English. The commentators seemed to talk as if they were on radio, and not television. Just then, one of the teams scored a goal and the announcer exploded into the the customary 'Go.............al' with the 'oooo' going on for a whole minute. Such enthusiasm is infectious and I found myself getting caught up in the excitement.

This got me thinking about the the time when radio was the source of sports news and live coverage. Some sports are well-suited for the radio as the pace of play allows the commentators to give a very good, detailed account of the proceedings. Others are either too slow or too fast paced. Golf for example allows enough time for the commentators to tell you the life story of the players between shots. The crowds are docile and clap dutifully at the appropriate times. Altogether too dull, if you ask me.

Cricket lends itself to radio commentary particularly well in my opinion, though nowadays it is all about the television. Remember the time you had to follow cricket matches through radio commentary? The sight of people with a small transistor radio glued to their ears was all too common before the advent of televised games. If the game was played overseas, the short wave radio enabled us to tune in to stations in Australia, England and West Indies to follow test matches played there. There were excellent commentators who brought the game to you in detail - ball by ball. Within India, it was All India Radio - AIR. Elsewhere, it would be ABC or BBC. Best of all, there were no commercials interrupting the game. Even during drink breaks.

Listening to someone describing the action creates some suspense and builds tension and anticipation. Consider this. The batsman hits a skier and a fielder is running to catch the ball. I recall one commentator going, 'Will he take it? Will he take it? Noooo..., he drops it'. Or this. 'No Australian fielder within speaking distance of another' when the West Indian batsmen were destroying the Aussie attack in a World Cup final. You do not get this when watching the game on TV. You can say that the commentary forces you to see the world (or just the sports field in this case) through someone else's eyes. I suppose we can all do with some of that.

When AIR decided to introduce Hindi commentary for cricket matches, I was concerned as I did not know the language. But as more than 90% of the description was in English, there was little difficulty in following - 'mid-off ki tarah push', 'sundar cover drive', and other things. Every field position  - slip, gully, cover, mid-on and so on, every stroke - off-drive, sweep, square cut, etc., was the same - they just used the English terms. There was no attempt to translate these, thank god. However, there was one crucial problem. I could not follow the score very well. I could make out the number of wickets, but the runs turned out to be tricky. I struggled to figure out the numbers especially past the forties. Mercifully, the commentary would change to English after a few minutes.

Now don't get me wrong. I have nothing against any language. For example, I used to like listening to radio coverage of hockey games in Hindi. Hockey being fast paced, kept the commentators on their toes. They tried hard to keep up and the commentary sometimes turned into a rapid chanting of the players' names - 'Virinder, Balwinder', etc. - as they passed the ball back and forth and advanced down the field. The English language could not match that just as it could not stand up against Spanish in soccer.

It is not that the English commentary was always great. The commentators on AIR varied a great deal in ability and had their own quirks. There was this time when one of them was providing a recap of the day's play till that point for the benefit of listeners overseas who would have just started receiving the direct relay. He opened with, 'Today is sankaranthi' and went on with what seemed like a prepared monologue. The misty morning, the cloudless sky that followed and of course the various happenings on the field too were covered. In the ten minutes that this took, there were a couple of big roars from the crowd but he ignored them and continued with the speech. At the end of it he informed us that two more wickets had fallen in the time he was giving the summary. So now he had to launch into another recap and almost missed the loss of the next wicket.

India's fascinating diversity provided us with endless opportunities to entertain ourselves by trying to come up with commentaries in Tamil, Telugu and so on. We used to wonder if the regional powers would actually try that. However, TV coverage started around this time and the language barrier was finally lifted. Nowadays the coverage is state of the art with multiple cameras and mikes everywhere. If only the commercials were kept in check and the commentators spoke less, things would be great.

The first commentator in history was probably Sanjaya in the epic Mahabharata where he described the happenings on the battlefield to the blind king Dhritarashtra. He (I mean Sanjaya of course and not the king) was blessed with divine vision to not only see things as they unfolded while sitting in the palace but also look into the fighters' minds and know their thoughts and feelings. Today's commentators sit in boxes and follow the game from a vantage position. Strangely, divine powers or not, they too purport to know what the players on the field are thinking if you believe what they say!

Finally, a word on the word 'commentator'. I am intrigued by this word. How did this come about? From comment, we have commenter. To comment is not the same as providing a commentary, so from the latter should we get commentarian? But we got commentator instead. That's English for you but I am not about to commentate on that.
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