Earlier this week, Channel 4 weren’t due to broadcast the Test series between India and England. Then, suddenly, a couple of days ago, they were. This doesn’t represent a great deal of prep time. How did day one go?

Let’s take look at the live coverage, the studio bits and the highlights*.

The live coverage

The first and most important thing to note is that Channel 4 aren’t doing the live coverage. They’re just taking Star Sports’ feed and showing that.

It looks like this.

The commentary seemed weirdly England-heavy a lot of the time with Nick Knight taking the lead. The nature of much of the day’s play denied Knight his beloved, “Should be four… is four,” and he was at times reduced to saying interesting things.

Mark Butcher was another former England player to feature and he is generally good.

Some of the other commentators are harder to assess. We long ago lost the ability to even hear Laxman Sivaramakrishnan because our brain has come to interpret the first sound of his voice as, “banalities incoming – stop listening”.

The studio bits

Back in the Channel 4 studio, we got presenter Rishi Persad and Sir Alastair Cook and no-one else.

It was weird and perhaps not all that helpful to have proceedings refracted solely through the eyes of Cook. While he was incredibly successful as a batsman, Cook is a man who approached the game in a very, very particular way.

His view on Rory Burns’ dismissal to a reverse sweep seemed to sum things up. “He didn’t need to play that shot,” he kept saying.

We know, Alastair. There are plenty of things cricketers don’t need to do, but that is not all that risk-reward analysis boils down to.

Another voice to temper Cook’s conclusions would be good. Maybe once they’ve bought another armchair they’ll give us that.

Maybe the budget will stretch to a full sofa.

One thing we did like was that they recapped the morning session an hour at a time, which gave the viewer a better feel for how things unfolded. They showed quick highlights of the first hour and then spoke about it before doing the same with the second hour.

By their very nature, short highlights can camouflage spells of digging in, so this is helpful.

Highlights

Weirdly, the main highlights show isn’t on normal TV. It’s only on All 4, Channel 4’s online on-demand service.

We just watched them and… it’s just a load of highlights. They don’t do any kind of discussion thing afterwards and there’s barely any kind of introduction before.

Here’s a trailer for The Edge, that documentary about the England team that got to number one in the world and then fell apart.

We had ten questions about an earlier trailer, but this second one really ramped up the seriousness.

NO ENGLAND TEAM FELL HARDER says one of the shouty captions and it’s pretty clear that there’s quite a lot about the psychological challenges of Test cricket in this film.

To really pull that off, a film-maker needs their subjects to look suitably serious. So, based on the two-minute trailer, let’s try and work out who’s doing a good job of looking serious and who’s doing a not-at-all-good job of looking serious.

Andrew Strauss – 1/10

We’re giving Strauss one point, because technically he does look serious. But this is just what Strauss looks like, isn’t it? He has an inherently serious face. We’re pretty sure he’s making zero effort here. This is just latent seriousness.

Steven Finn – 2/10

Steven Finn is less fundamentally serious than Andrew Strauss, but he’s still making very little effort. He’s actually using the phrase “psychological trauma,” but based on his face, it seems just as likely that he’s saying, “small americano, please.” The mere absence of levity does not satisfactorily convey seriousness within a documentary.

Kevin Pietersen – 2/10

Exactly the same goes for KP, who’s saying, “crying in the dressing room,” but conveying, “this is a slightly longer queue than I’d anticipated.”

Ian Bell – 4/10

This one’s very tricky. Bell’s staring into the middle distance and has clearly endured such profound psychological trauma that he’s had to become a hipster. High marks for both those things, but then you look again, with that new Hipster Bell character mind, and you wonder whether he’s merely perusing a chalk board listing American IPAs at some sort of Sunday afternoon ‘community’ event. That diminishes things considerably, so we’re marking him down.

Matt Prior – 5/10

Bit route one, but hard to fault. Staring into the middle distance, clearly contemplating something from the past.

Jimmy Anderson – 7/10

A similar move to Prior’s, but Jimmy’s thrown in a soupcon more melancholy and the implication that it’s all become so much that he’s had to have a bit of a sit down. Jimmy also gets an extra point for looking like his career was completely derailed when he’s since become England’s greatest bowler and everything’s actually completely fine (except for the cacophony of ‘niggles’ that will blight his life long after he’s retired).

Monty Panesar – 9/10

Monty’s still in his wood-panelled Mississippi paddle steamer. (Is he trapped in there?) He’s doing everything Jimmy’s doing, but with the added implication that he’s sitting drinking alone. Drinking alone is fine of course, but Monty seems like he’s doing it in the depressing way and not the fun way where you play Civilization for a couple of hours and then watch the cricket highlights.

Jonathan Trott – ineligible

Initially we assumed that he’d got in his kit and acted this, but then we thought: ‘What if he hasn’t? What if that’s footage of Jonathan Trott genuinely being really unhappy?’ at which point we decided we probably shouldn’t rate this one.

Graeme Swann – 0/10

[While laughing] “I was absolutely devastated.”

First published in May 2019.

Tonight was the first episode of the BBC’s new Test highlights show. It’s called Today at the Test, which is a great name (although given today’s rain and its 45-minute running time, this first one should probably have been called Today at the Test Plus Quite a Bit of Other Stuff.)

It’s early days, but it’s immediately obvious that they’ve got some simple yet important things correct.

1. If you missed the 7pm start time, you could bring it up on the iPlayer and click ‘watch from start’
2. It was available on the iPlayer thereafter
3. They’re using Soul Limbo for the theme tune

That last one is particularly important. They could have used something completely new or they could have used an updated ‘trendy’ version of the same song, which is a very bad thing that TV people sometimes see fit to do.

Fortunately, they didn’t do either of these things. They recognised that they’d always had the perfect opening and they didn’t piss about with it.

PROGRAMME TITLES: that iconic theme tune has returned. Cricket is back on the BBC, and so is Soul Limbo. #CricketIsBackOnTheBBC #ProgrammeTitles pic.twitter.com/KTbajPaPqi

— The TV Room (@thetvroom) July 8, 2020

Isa Guha is the host. Isa Guha is solid. Probably a better commentator than presenter at the minute, but that’ll change in no time.

Alastair Cook and Carlos Brathwaite joined her for the pre-match chat and the three of them didn’t exactly run it fine with the social distancing.

Cook spoke borderline eloquently. Turns out he is only the worst public speaker in history when he’s captaining England.

Alison Mitchell, Michael Vaughan and Phil Tufnell supplemented those three on commentary. Mitchell is great and Vaughan is fine when he’s only really taking about live cricket. Tuffers was relaxed and amiable.

Vaughan came back at the end to talk through the day.

This is Michael Vaughan’s hair at the minute.

Michael Vaughan is 45 years old.

With just a few overs of play in an empty ground, this wasn’t exactly a dynamite day to cover, but all in all we found Today at the Test professional and inoffensive. It’s pretty much exactly how you’d expect it to be really.

We can’t wait to find out which specific elements are going to drive us absolutely mental once we’re a few Test matches deep.

As reported back in 2017, the BBC are going to be showing the Test highlights this summer, not Channel 5. They’ll be covering the one-dayers too.

The news feels kind of irrelevant at the minute, but actually England v West Indies is due to go ahead from July 8.

It looks like the show will go out at 7pm on BBC2. We presume it’ll be on the iPlayer too – which is good because the Beeb tend to upload their digital content pretty rapidly.

Channel 5’s Test highlights show was great, but the big failing for us was that it quite often didn’t appear on their on-demand service until the following day. When it’s 10pm on a Friday or Saturday and you’ve got a beer in your hand and you’ve mentally mapped out the rest of your night and your plans very much centre on watching the Test highlights, that’s pretty much unforgivable.

Isa Guha will present. Pundits will include Michael Vaughan, the not-quite-as-mealy-mouthed-as-we-expected Alastair Cook and Carlos Brathwaite – whose name you may or may not remember from the 2016 World T20 final.

Live coverage remains on Sky Sports. We’re still going pay-as-you go for that with Now TV. Here’s a bit more on the pros and cons of doing that.

The other big BBC cricket news this week is that Geoff Boycott’s not going to be on Test Match Special (TMS).

The Yorkshireman’s contract ran out last year and it doesn’t seem hugely likely he’ll get another. This coming coronavirus-riddled summer poses a particular problem given his age and health.

He confirmed this himself on Twitter in a comment with a quite perfectly Boycottian climax.

“Recently I had a quadruple heart by-pass and at 79 am the wrong age to be commentating in a bio secure area trapped all day in confined spaces with the same people – even if some of those commentators I regard as friends and others I admire.”

That may of course be a self-aware acknowledgement that he doesn’t have too many friends. Feels more like an implied diss though, doesn’t it?

If we restrict our opinions purely to his commentary, we would go so far as to say we were not wholly anti-Boycott.

By the way, if you’re wondering about the image at the top of this post, it’s from this.

The Edge is a 1997 film starring Anthony Hopkins, Alec Baldwin, Elle Macpherson and Bart the Bear, a kodiak bear who also starred in Legends of the Fall among other things (actual fact).

It is a lost-in-the-wilderness-getting-hunted-by-a-kodiak-bear film.

The Edge is also a 2019 documentary about the last England team to get to number one in the world but which then fell apart.

You can watch the trailer here.

Here are ten important questions that arise after watching said trailer.

1. Does Andy Flower always talk that slowly?

Because honestly, if that was how he gave his team talks, we would have taken in precisely zero information. We were a word ahead of him throughout and would definitely have joined Kevin Pietersen in staring out of the window daydreaming. Life is short, Andy! Pick up the pace.

2. What’s in KP’s pocket?

Horrific to contemplate, but sadly also unavoidable to contemplate.

3. What in hell is Jonathan Trott doing?

Dancing, yes – that much is obvious, but (a) why is he dancing like that? And (b) why is he dancing at all? (We always felt that Jonathan Trott was ‘above’ dancing, so this is a very disappointing revelation.)

4. Do the film makers own a spirit level?

We’ve a strong suspicion that no England changing rooms were built at this angle.

5. Who was the groundsman responsible for this pitch?

What is that? Corduroy or something? If so, who’s the tiny batsman?

6. Who will deliver the finest ‘tough times’ reaction shot?

A staple of all serious documentaries is the bit when the interviewee talks about a difficult time and then the camera lingers on them so that you can see the raw emotion. Alastair Cook is clearly doing a very good job of that here, but his team-mates will doubtless make their own attempts. Who will be the best/most overwrought? (We also get to see Andrew Strauss gazing mournfully to the heavens and Ian Bell staring glumly at the ground. Then we get to see Graeme Swann give a big shit-eating grin because Graeme Swann has his own thing going on.)

7. Where is Monty Panesar?

It’s so dark and the footage is so grainy we can’t really make it out. It looks like Monty’s polishing glasses on a wood-panelled Mississippi paddle steamer. Possibly one that doubles as a casino.

8. Just how monumentally annoying was that pre-Ashes boot camp?

Looks to be at least 8/10 annoying. Possibly 9/10.

9. How did Chris Tremlett get a bruised rib?

We get a very brief glimpse of two people having a fight. One person is being lifted in the air and is really scrabbling madly, like Scrappy Doo. The other guy is not. We can only presume this is the legendary fight that entirely predictably left Jimmy Anderson with a broken rib and completely inexplicably left Chris Tremlett with a bruised rib?

How much ‘sprinkler’ will there be?

Because we can only take a finite amount. In all honesty, we’re a bit sprinklered out just from the trailer and the trailer features almost zero sprinkler.

First published in December 2018.

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2 minute readThe number one highlight of a friend’s stag-do was when we all took it in turns to throw stones into the sea using our ‘other’ arm. (Which is to say the non-doing arm – the left one for us.)

When throwing with your wrong arm, the more effort you put in, the worse you look. It is a highly entertaining pastime and we fully recommend it and also you should video your efforts and send us the footage.

Among the minor joys of Sky Sports’ coverage of England’s 2018 tour of Sri Lanka were the segments in which Nasser Hussain, Rob Key and Ian Ward – and really there’s no other way to put this – dicked about. One Hussain-Key-Ward dicking about segment was ostensibly about how difficult it is to bowl competently with your other hand – a feature inspired by Sri Lanka’s ambidextrous spinner, Kamindu Mendis.

That’s what it was supposed to be. In reality it was three middle-aged sportsmen laughing at each other’s incompetence while simultaneously getting really quite competitive.

Real, actual sportsmen are basically unhinged and don’t stop being unhinged just because they’ve retired. These three are among the more self-aware ex-cricketers and none takes himself too seriously, but even so they’re still super-competitive. This is what can happen to a person when they spend many years playing games for a living. Earlier in the tour, the three of them went up Sigiriya and for no reason at all it deteriorated into a race.

As for the other-handedness, let’s take a quick look and then give each of them a star rating.

Ward is admirably dreadful and almost immediately resorts to throwing (which is surely harder?)

“It’s like he’s never played anything,” observes Key – later adding: You’re the worst sportsman left-handed I’ve ever seen.”

Key is merely pretty bad but rather impressively appears to have difficulty running left-handed.

Hussain is, all things considered, good. He starts by bowling finger spin and then advances to doing impressions (at which point things become a little less good).

In summary:

• Ian Ward is the worst and therefore the best – 4 stars (one star deducted for not persisting with it)
• Rob Key is more adept at imposing and changing rules on the fly than bowling left-handed but can sort of aim and is therefore probably better than 90 per cent of the population – 3 stars (mostly for the run-up)
• You’d definitely pick Nasser Hussain if you actually wanted to win a game, but thanks to his sickening competence, he is the least funny – 1 star

First published in October 2018.

Remember that England documentary, The Edge? You should do because we wrote about two of the trailers.

Back at the arse-end of last year, we had 10 important questions about the first one, and then a few months ago, we rated the ‘serious face’ of every England player who appeared in the second one. (This is exactly the kind of hard-hitting journalism we pride ourself on.)

We wrote so much about the trailers that we’ve had to get someone else to (quickly) review the film itself.

Sam writes:

Most of you will have already read or heard reviews of ‘The Edge’, the new film by Barney Douglas. It’s basically a whistle-stop tour through the lifespan of the Strauss-Flower England team which went from chumps to champs and back again between 2009 and 2013.

It’s a fantastic watch, providing some unique insights and very funny and emotional moments. Tim Bresnan and Steve Finn come out of it particularly well. They both use some fruity language and don’t seem to take themselves too seriously, unlike Matt ‘Big Cheese’ Prior and Kevin ‘It’s Tough Being Me’ Pietersen. 

The film ends with several players detailing why their respective careers were brought to a premature end. Each man has a different story, of course, and a ghost-written book in which to tell it. But they all circle back to the same reason – the relentless international schedule.

As the credits rolled, I switched on my phone to find cricket headlines across all the newspaper back pages. Joe Root had given an interview at the end of a rollercoaster Ireland Test.

Ten days after an utterly bonkers World Cup final, with just a week to go until the Ashes starts, Root admitted he is physically and mentally exhausted.  

Over time, we’ve become more and more fascinated with one of David Lloyd’s hands. It is the one that hangs by his side when Ian Ward interviews himself and Nasser Hussain at the end of each day’s play on Sky Sports. It is not the one that holds the microphone. It is the redundant one. The unoccupied one.

When Nasser Hussain is answering a question, David Lloyd’s unoccupied hand generally does one of two things: it either does an awkward impression of a passive hand or it gets all restless.

Here is David Lloyd’s hand doing a very bad impression of a normal, relaxed hand hanging by his side.

Look how rigid it is. That’s not a normal, relaxed hand. That’s a hand that’s seen a normal, relaxed hand and is consciously trying to affect the same posture.

Here’s another attempt. It does this one a lot.

To be clear, that’s not a hand that’s in motion. That is a static hand. Weirdly static, actually. Borderline creepily static. It is absolutely frozen in that awkward, bent-knuckled, flared-thumbed position and it stays like that for way longer than you’d think possible.

Just when you think it might never move again, it does the restless thing. This typically takes the form of a thumb flick.

It starts like this.

And ends like this.

It’s a thumb flick. You can work out what we mean by a thumb flick.

It does this again and again and again. And then it freezes.

The more we’ve watched David Lloyd’s unoccupied hand, the more we’ve started to sympathise with it.

First of all, consider the context. The end-of-play interview is a fundamentally awkward affair where two of the three people involved will always be doing nothing at all. They’ll just be standing there while the other person talks.

This is uncomfortable enough, but then consider those moments when Nasser Hussain holds forth on some aspect of English cricket.

Like his colleague Mike Atherton, Nasser Hussain’s role in the Sky commentary team is to be clear and fair and insightful.

Bob Willis’s job was to have strong opinions and express them in a very black and white way and to be hugely entertaining in the process. There were few things more satisfying in life than agreeing with Bob Willis on a matter that irked him. As he tore his target a new one, you felt (a) that the tearing of new ones was justified and (b) that the new one had been very effectively torn by someone extremely adept at the tearing of new ones.

In contrast, Atherton and Hussain are more nuanced. They identify problems but give both sides of the story, set the issue in context and explain why what is happening is happening. Willis was watchable in an entertaining way, but Atherton and Hussain are watchable in an educational way.

When these two speak, their words carry weight. You feel you have to listen. Like many people, we make a great many bad and weak decisions in our life and we sometimes wish we could subcontract all of our decision-making to Athers and Hussain. In this fantasy, they would follow us round like two wise angels and our life would improve immeasurably. (To be clear, our life is fine and lovely and even sometimes wonderful, but we still feel it would be unimaginably greater and that we would be infinitely more successful in every sphere if we constantly had access to the thinking power of Atherton and Hussain.)

We suppose what we’re saying is that we trust Atherton and Hussain completely.

Of the two, Hussain is the more passionate, which means that his end-of-play interviews can feel more essential, even if the nuts and bolts of what is being said is actually the same.

When Nasser latches on to a particular subject that really animates him – say, England’s selection policy or the fact that county cricket isn’t preparing batsmen for Test cricket – all his colleagues can do is just step back and let him go.

Nasser will talk for minutes and at the end of it you will feel smarter, better-informed and somewhat inferior.

Now imagine being David Lloyd in this situation. We’d like to emphasise that we like Bumble very much. We believe that in the right environment – which is to say one where he is not being actively indulged by TV producers – he is a genuinely funny man. His off-the-cuff comments betray sharp comic timing; he can find humorous angles on on-field events; and he can most definitely deliver an anecdote. But during a Nasser Hussain diatribe, he’s basically a bystander. And worse than that, he’s a bystander who’s being asked to stand still on live TV.

David Lloyd is a knowledgeable cricket man and he holds his own during the end-of-play interview, but he is not – and we really can’t emphasise this enough – he is not Nasser Hussain.

Standing next to Nasser as he first identifies everything that’s wrong with the England team, then everything that’s wrong with English cricket, then everything that’s wrong with world cricket, then everything that’s wrong with the world, must be a humbling experience. Whoever you are, if you’re standing there nominally doing the same job, you’d have to feel something of a fraud.

And to make that point again: they’re filming you while this happens.

As you stand there thinking, ‘What am I doing here? What is my purpose within this segment?’ you’re also standing in front of a sizeable TV audience. No matter how experienced a broadcaster you are, it must be a nerve-wracking mentally-destructive experience.

Now consider David Lloyd’s hands. This is speaking television and the person you’re attached to isn’t even speaking. You could barely be more redundant. The left hand at least has a microphone to hold, but the right hand is just a useless, pointless thing that has nothing to offer whatsoever.

Imagine being that hand. Imagine being that hand in that situation: having no skills, no strengths, no role. You always thought you’d become smart and worthy and valuable, but at times like this it feels like all you are is the most useless part of a person who some people find moderately amusing.

This is an updated version of an article first published in February 2019.

Many things are said when a Test team’s bowled out for 77. When that team is England, who’s honestly got time to listen to all those words?

Let’s just look at the faces.

Which Sky Sports commentator best summed up 77 all out with their face?

Ian Ward

Deadly serious. A very good representation of one of the many possible emotional reactions to 77 all out. However, you can’t help but feel he took the easy option.

Score: 6/10

David Lloyd

Blank waiting-for-a-bus face. Bumble actually went for something’s-very-wrong incredulity a little later, but sorry we don’t have a screengrab of that.

Score: 3/10 for this one, maybe 7/10 for the rather more emotional face-pulling later on.

Nasser Hussain

Vexed and confused. Twin emotions expressed simultaneously and also delivered with Hussain’s trademark passion. This was really very fine work.

Score: 9/10

Bob Willis

Standard Bob Willis face.

Score: 10/10

2 minute readWe’re not generally enamoured with apps, as they often seem to make the absolute least of storage space and processing power to deliver much the same content that can be found on the equivalent website.

However, as a result of the televisual shenanigans that have seen BT broadcasting this Ashes series, we have uncharacteristically seen fit to take the plunge with the BT Sport app. And we rather like it.

Phone screens don’t make for the finest viewing experience, but the way the app is set up is great for matches where half the day’s play takes place before you wake up.

Various little video snippets showing major wickets and quirkier events are presented in the cricket section of the app, but the big advantage is being able to scan the whole day’s play to watch a far greater number of meaningful events.

One of the things we hate most in the entire universe is the assumption that people want to watch videos instead of reading articles. The reason for this is that you can’t scan a video. You just have to sit there and tolerate it while the information drips out at a brain-aggravatingly slow pace, like olive oil from one of those dribbly pourers.

The BT Sport app though? The BT Sport app has an annotated timeline.

Annotated timelines are better than blue stilton on toast

In all honesty, a furious ongoing attempt to ‘get through the stilton’ means this comparison isn’t quite as complimentary as it was when we started writing this article a few days ago. But even so, the annotated timeline is unequivocally ‘a good thing’.

Maybe it’s the same on other apps, but we’re a huge fan of the smear of iconry down at the bottom of the screengrab above. It lets you pick out boundaries, wickets and chances, but also little mini highlights montages and chunks of punditry.

As you wake, bleary-eyed, it’s easy to pass a good little while catching up with cricketing events while you try and summon the will to emerge for the three hours of twilight that pass for daytime at this point in the British winter.

We’re going to give the BT Sport app a score of 9/10 because while we can’t think of what else we’d like to see, that’s only because we haven’t actually given the matter a great deal of thought.