Listening to Cricket - an altogether different experience

I had been following cricket since my early childhood - as early as my 2nd standard, along with my brother. Very early on, it was radio commentary. I still remember when once I ran into my dad's room shouting Gavaskar scored a century and my dad's colleague who was present there said it wasn't Gavaskar but it was Chetan Chauhan, just to tease me a little. Unshaken, I insisted that it was Gavaskar. He asked me how I knew it and I told him that I had been following it on radio. It is another matter, Chetan Chauhan didn't score a single century in his entire test career, though he came close to achieving that a few times.

A few years later, my father bought a stereo cum radio and we started getting BBC and ABC commentary. We immediately fell in love with their commentary, especially the voice of Chris Martin Jenkins on BBC. It was so refreshing compared to the commentary on AIR. The excitement came from the analysis provided by the veteran commentators on those channels compared to the bland description of the proceedings on AIR. Once in a while we used to have a few good voices, but they were very far and few in between. There was a huge gulf in the quality of commentating.

We regularly used to tune in to these radio channels whenever there was a test match being played. Of course, we used to do lot of circus like keeping the radio in a specific angle, trying for that exact position of the frequency where clarity was maximum, moving the aerial in different directions to get the best possible audio and sometimes moving the whole set into a different room for better receptivity. But we never gave up.

Slowly this has given way to watching cricket on TV starting with the Benson and Hedges world cup in 1995 and the Sharjah Cup tournaments. Of course many of those radio commentators graduated to TV and also did a great job. I can't remember how much of live action we actually used to miss owing to advertisements those days. It was pure and live cricket all the way. We had even the chance to see the players in between overs. For example, we would watch very carefully whether Gavaskar and Vengsarkar communicated at all in the middle while batting together to see and interpret whether there is anything amiss in their relationship. Compare that with the rationing of cricket we get on television today in between advertisements and one wonders whether we were better off following cricket on the radio in the good old days. Alas! there is nothing like pure cricket today (I am only talking about the audience experience and nothing else). Like everything else in modern world, cricket too has become impure making one more facet of life boring and dull.