Sometimes the art of sport commentary is knowing when to shut up

When I was a kid growing up in Greensborough, what was then regarded as an outer-suburb in Melbourne, I was sports crazy. I’d inherited Dad’s love of cricket and Australian Rules football and shared his gratitude for Mum’s forbearance with our enthusiasms.

There, in the wide-open spaces of Dad’s carefully cultivated lawn, with the pages of a newspaper compactly folded into something vaguely approximating the oval ball and held together by a tightly wound elastic band, I’d rush around kicking the “football” into the air, racing to mark it, and shooting for goal (with a rotary hoist and a tree stump serving as the big sticks).

Ricky Ponting commentating with Tim Lane: always worth tuning in to.

All the while, casting myself as a star in the theatre of my guileless imagination, I’d spout commentary in line with whatever game I was playing. God knows what the Bamfords on one side and the Woods on the other thought was going on, but I was very serious about what I was doing.

My models were the champions of the time, usually Essendon footballers and Victorian and Australian cricketers. For my calls, I drew on the vocal styles and verbal wizardry of the radio commentators of the time: Phil Gibbs, Doug Heywood and Norman Banks for what were then VFL matches; Alan McGilvray, John Arlott and Charles Fortune for the cricket. Distinctive voices that have reverberated across generations.

Nowadays, from the comfort of the armchair at a carefully calibrated distance from the large-screen TV, I allow others to do the work for me both on the field and in the commentary box. But I still take sports and the talk bestowed on them very seriously. And all of those years I’ve spent watching and writing about films and TV shows have kept me attentive to the often-extraordinary camera coverage of the games (regularly a five-star achievement) and dismayed by the sometimes disappointing ways in which it’s cut together.

The annoyance of the insistently cliched editing of AFL matches – the goal umpire signalling a major always leads to shots of crowd members making cretins of themselves for the camera – is matched only by the formulaic blandness of much of the current commentary. Along the same lines, the multi-camera approach to cricket – and the replays – means that we’re never going to miss anything, at least not until the person at the helm decides that the shots of drunken yahoos (it used to be pretty girls) are of greater interest than the interactions on the field.

Alan McGilvray at the mic in 1968: a distinctive voice reverberating across the generations.Credit: Fairfax

The way sport is presented on television can be an art form of its own – when it’s done right. And the commentary has a major role to play in shaping it. These days, the preference appears to be for former players to dominate. As a result, viewers are often the recipients of informed views about subtleties of the game that they might otherwise miss. Sometimes, though, it’s like sitting at a game next to someone who just won’t shut up.

There’s frequently a major difference in style and quality between match-calls by professional sportscasters and the “expert comments” from ex-players. The collaborations between them are at their best when the anchors are skilled hosts – such as ace caller Tim Lane, Isa Guha or Anthony Hudson – making sharp observations about the play, asking intelligent questions, offering perceptive interjections, and guiding the ex-players’ insights into the strategies unfolding on the field.

I’ll always tune in to hear Lane and Ricky Ponting (when he’s available) for the opening shift of a day’s play on Seven’s Test coverages, and Fox Sports’ Mark Howard and the much-missed Shane Warne made for an incomparable duo.

What we don’t need is a literal kick-by-kick or ball-by-ball description (or misdescription) of what we can already see, or a deluge of data (the fallback when a commentator is at a loss for words), or a long-winded explanation about what’s just happened after the game has moved on. Like the anchors, the experts need to know when to pipe down and just let the sport weave its particular magic or to find imaginative ways to colour in the silences.

Leigh Matthews, Nathan Buckley, Bruce McAvaney and Dennis Cometti on Seven’s Friday Night Football in 2009.Credit: Seven

A commentator’s personality is critical to how he or she performs behind the mic. Some professional callers seem to have been born to the role just as some sportspeople appear to have been gifted with innate abilities. But what’s often forgotten is that, just as being able to call a game doesn’t make you eligible to play it, being able to play a game doesn’t automatically qualify you as a commentator.

In both cases, even if the end result appears effortless, work is required to achieve it. For the sportscaster, it’s research, voice training, a familiarity with the ins-and-outs of the game and its players, as well as with the basic grammar of the English language (the ability, for example, to know when “him” rather than “he” is the right word to use), and the capacity to converse rather than just shoot off at the mouth.

Matthew Hayden’s declamatory style doesn’t encourage engaging viewing. It often seems as if the former champion opening batsman is trying to bash us into submission in much the same way as he dealt with bowlers. Measured observations matter and most come from the Fox footy team. Garry Lyon, Nathan Buckley, Gerard Healy, Jonathan Brown, Jordan Lewis and Leigh Matthews are the pick of the current bunch of ex-players who deliver the goods, even if the sporting culture that spawned them has sometimes made it difficult for them to come to terms with the changing times.

Matthew Hayden in the Boxing Day Test against India in 2007. Hayden commentates like he treated bowlers.Credit: Vince Caligiuri

Sometimes eccentricity overcomes the limitations of a commentary. Brian Taylor’s reading of the play and his facility with spoken English might leave something to be desired. But his foibles have a wacky appeal, one which is ably supported by the endearing Matthew Richardson’s appealingly mischievous ways.

Alongside the indefatigable and ever-enthusiastic Bruce McAvaney, Seven’s now-retired Dennis Cometti was able to bring the dullest AFL matches alive with his sharp wit and concise descriptions. Often in a similarly entertaining way, Fox Sports has Kerry O’Keeffe. And Howard always brings a sense of fun to his shifts. But Cometti’s skills serve as a model to which most can only aspire, and his calls were packed with memorable one-liners.

Like the one that could only have come off the top of his head: “Ball to Barker to Barlow … the Hawks are attacking alphabetically!” Or his response to Geelong forward Barry Stoneham’s blunder when a pass goes straight through his hands and hits him in the face: “A classic example of kiss my pass.” Or his “Scotty Cummings, alone in the square … jumping up and down and waving his arms like they’re playing My Sharona.”

The coming year is going to be a testing time for AFL commentators in particular, with Fox Sports no longer required to take Seven’s calls, and Seven spending up big on new recruits (but, alas, losing Tim Watson, their best). And while there will be numerous factors in play – free-to-air vs subscriptions, ads vs uninterrupted coverage during play – one thing is for sure. The skills of the commentary teams will play a huge role in the choices viewers make about which service they’re going to tune into.

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