The world cup: commentary as ghazal?

Televised international cricket matches would be nothing – nada, nyet! – without its phalanx of commentators. There is no other sport which employs so many ex-cricketers ready to bring to its television viewers a unique discourse that makes the viewing experience of international level cricket a thing apart. Premier League football had, until recently when it discovered the market potential for ex-players to provided game analysis, too large a ratio of professional commentators vis-à-vis ex-players. They are still playing catch-up to cricket. And, say, for something like tennis, well, its set structure means that its commentary could add very little to the visual game itself.

But cricket's play-by-play analysts and commentators have always been born raconteurs. Perhaps it is due to the nature of the game itself, spread over days, with its time spread that demanded that its commentators explore recondite alleyways, to share with its listeners and viewers about aspects of the game and players that other sports could not afford to. Everything else is a fast 90 minutes compared to cricket. Perhaps it is the cricketers themselves, who have grown up in a tradition where raconteuring is an art almost as valuable as cricketing skills themselves. Watching a World Cup clip I saw Sir Vivian Richards reminiscing about the 1979 World Cup match final where he was bowling to Boycott, and the batsman mistimed one uppishly to Clive Lloyd. Lloyd fumbled and dropped the catch! Lloyd then ran over to Viv Richards and said, ''I would have taken the catch but didn't''. ''Why'', asked Sir Viv. ''Because I want Boycott (who had taken 17 overs to reach double figures, partnering with an equally slow Brearly, whose catch Lloyd had also previously dropped!) to bat on and England to lose!'' The tale was told by Sir Viv with consummate skill, with pauses and dips, accompanied by rich cackles. It ended with Sir Viv shaking his head ruefully, "Man, that Lloyd! A World Cup wicket is a World Cup wicket, and Lloyd made me minus one."

I have seen plenty of baseball clips, old and new, and never have I seen a baseball god relate such a tale in so comradely a fashion, with so little distance between a god and his devotees.

Or maybe it's because Sir Viv is a West Indian, with rum and calypso inherent in his batting and his story-telling. It's the beat, the pause, and the rhythm. But wait, that can't be. White guys, and young 'uns at that, are just as good too.

Watching one Ashes series I remember Nasser Hussain (who despite an Indian father is as white an Englishman as can be!) and an Aussie whose name I forget getting onto the topic of class differences in cricket in England and Australia respectively. What do you mean, asked Nasser. Well, for example, the Aussie said, you guys have all these Sirs in cricket. You mean somebody like Sir David Gower, asked Nasser. David Gower, here I should remind readers, is the distinguished, high-street end of the Ashes commentary team. Sir David Gower. Yes, said the Aussie. What about him, asked Nasser. Well, to us guys from Australia, he's what we call a Yozzie. What? Yes, a Yozzie, replied the Aussie, meaning it was Australian cricketing slang for somebody snooty and fancy. Sir David Yozzie, cackled Nasser, and started to roll on the floor, laughing to beat the band.

Or perhaps it's cricket's vast literature. This literature has constructed the game's myths and legends, its folkways and byways, with so many stories and tales that story-telling has become synonymous with the game. What, after all, is a campfire or a cricket match without its corresponding good yarn?

Or perhaps it is a generational thing, the fact that we the 'older' generation of viewers grew up listening to radio commentary, with no visuals at all, and therefore became highly sensitised to the spoken word. I myself remember in Pakistan growing up to cricket matches being relayed by the voices of Omar Kureishi and Jamshed Marker. Memories of Zaheer Abbas' double century carries with it ineffably the grain and tone of these two voices. And then we transited over, after Bangladesh and Kerry Packer and Patrick Eager's photos in Cricketer magazine, to listening to Geoff Boycott, David 'Bumble' Lloyd and Tony Cozier. And here Heaven help the heavy-footed fielder. Instantly you would get Boycott to do a scathing 'Me mum could have caught that in her pinny' –  a 'pinny' being of course a pinafore, which British mums during the interwar years donned for kitchen duties. Or to Bumble's casual throwaway comment that why, the current English team are 'as fit as maggots.'

But those are the oldsters, the men from BBC 4's Test Match Special team, part of a crew that once included John Arlott, Brian Johnston and Tony Lewis. The newer crop are people like Mike Atherton, Shane Warne, Nasser Hussain, Ian Botham, the Chappell brothers, Dean Jones. Ian Botham ('Beefy' to Englishmen and his friends) is somebody who I especially enjoy. Ian has long been known to enjoy his wine. Gifted with not only extraordinary cricketing skills but with a strong constitution the Aussies have long charged him with deliberately throwing all-night parties before Ashes games in order to get hung over Australians on the cricket field the next day to face a Botham, apparently unaffected even after consuming enormous quantities of liquor, charging into them. So it was with interest I listened to him talk about the Irish team a day after the Bangladesh-Ireland match. Strong lads, he said of the Irish. And then added, Let me tell you, none of them on the wagon. What do you mean, asked Nasser the straight man in the duo. I mean they are Irish, Botham said, a fine bunch of lads. Both of them then started to laugh. Hard and knowingly. The import of Botham's approval was clear: the Irish team apparently was also very Irish in its drinking matches. What lesson, I wondered, could Bangladesh take from that.

But as in cricket the game, so too in commentating. The list of playing nations and speakers has become longer. From about a decade back the Indians and Pakistanis – Ravi Shastri, Rameez Raja, Sunil Gavasker, Wasim Akram, etc., – have joined the analyst ranks. And the stories and legends now embrace those South Asian nations too. During the England v India match, Rameez and Wasim started chatting about Imran Khan's captaincy of the Pakistani team. ''He never allowed you to eat a burger,'' said Rameez to Wasim. In fact, Rameez told viewers, ''Wasim would hide in the corner and make sure nobody saw him eating a burger.'' Wasim Akram was apparently under orders to eat healthy, and had to hide in dressing room corners to wolf down burgers. Wasim laughed and replied that, in fact, even now when he meets Imran, he is asked by his ex-captain, Are you eating healthy. And Wasim said he replies, Yes, yes, boss. What about you, asked Wasim of Rameez. Oh, I was hammered every day, replied Rameez. But like Wasim, Rameez never resented Imran's strictures, never minded a single second of it from a great captain. The exchange was a remarkable one, fantastic insider stuff that added to the gloss on the Pakistan team led by Imran Khan, added to that great common storehouse of memories and folk tales by which cricket lives and breathes.

Bangladeshis have yet to join this exclusive club. Except for Athar Ali. Thank God for him. But Athar is not the bantering sort, and though he was a fine cricketer he lacks that international stature, and therefore even if he does essay the occasional story it is too local for it to really resonate. He should tell a few Bangladesh versus Australia at Cardiff jokes. But on a more serious note, or drawback is that not only we are too recent a Test Playing nation, but we have too stunted a sense of history and tradition. And we have yet to produce genuine cricket literature, which is the source of cricketing yarns and stories that leads to the emergence of story-telling styles. Our television commentators tend towards the prescriptive and normative, too much the sober analysts in the dead zone of the talk show framework. We have ex-players who sadly sound like talking heads, without a framework of writing and speaking that can unleash their raconteuring skills to a wider public. But most of all, we have no English language commentary and story-telling and cricket writing, without which no great cricketing literature was built, no great tale ever joined the cricketing mainstream, and without which all banter and stories are purely localised, unable to drink from the greater English language well of cricketing myth making and legend spinning.

But perhaps we could make a start. During these World Cup matches I often have snuck off from the English language commentary to the Hindi one, drawn by a commentary style and language that is markedly different from the texture and rhythms of the English ones I have listened to all my life. There I was during one stretch of the Bangladesh-Ireland match when one commentator bantered to the other, So who's going to win. The second commentator, watching the Bangladeshi spinners toil away without reward, acknowledged that he was drawn to the Irish. Well, replied the first one, I'm for Bangladesh. Really, why, asked the Hindi-speaking Irish supporter. It's the crowd, the first guy said, pausing to let the stadium roar speak for itself as an Irish wicket fell just then. It's romantic, he continued, this kind of support, and when you have romance in your heart, then the lungs fill up with air and you are capable of anything.

A ghazal, a veritable ghazal, disguised as cricket commentary! And if the Hindiwallahs can do it perhaps we should too forge our own style of commentary, replete with stories and romance, in English and Bengali, throw off our stunted sense of cricket history and tradition (even the little we have!) so that we too as Bangladeshis can join the Yozzas at the head of the commentary table.

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Khademul Islam is a Bangladeshi writer, editor and critic.