Posted by Give us this day our daily treat: 15 to 20 minutes of two 50-something former England captains broadcasting their grey area opinions with a sense of humour and a lack of ego.
Sky Sports doesn’t have the rights to this Ashes series because they were again snaffled up by what is now TNT Sports. This isn’t great because not only is Sky Sports’ cricket coverage excellent, but the channels aren’t even owned by Rupert Murdoch any more, so you don’t have to give the satanic old prick any money if you subscribe to it.
The Ashes on TNT Sports
We’re going to break with popular opinion on this and say that TNT’s coverage is adequate. They show you all the pictures; the app’s annotated timeline is great for mainlining all the finer elements of the overnight horror show each morning; and some of the broadcast team have their moments.
Of the two non-cricket commentators who have been roped in from other sports, Rob Hatch, the multilingual cycling commentator from Clitheroe, does a solid job. He’s relaxed, he seems to know cricket and he gets on with the ex-pros well enough that they can joke a bit without it descending into that excruciating self-conscious awkward banter you so often get. We believe the other fella is a rugby guy. We haven’t yet formed an opinion on him.
One unexpected revelation has been Sir Alastair Cook’s previously well-hidden dry humour. There is something under that bland, safe exterior after all! Turns out he isn’t uniquely badly qualified for the role he now fulfils! Rather delightfully, Cook has seen fit to take unnecessary pot shots at all sorts of people this series. At one point he expressed sympathy for Alex Carey for having to embrace Marnus Labuschagne when celebrating a wicket. Another time, you could almost hear his eyes roll when Steve Smith was claiming to have been distracted by some distant atom behind the bowler’s arm. Good stuff, Sralastair! More of this sort of thing!
At the same time, sometimes the coverage makes you want to switch off and go for a shower. Matt Prior hamming up his cheerleading for Joe Root to the max as the Yorkshiremen approached his first Ashes hundred stands out as being an especially grisly passage of audio.
The end of day analysis can sometimes feel like a bit of a lightweight nonevent as well. Fortunately, that doesn’t matter because you can instead watch…
Athers and Nass on YouTube
Sky Sports doesn’t have the Ashes broadcast rights, so it can’t show you the action. It can show people talking about it though.
So it does. And it puts it on YouTube for free.
“Athers? Nass? Why don’t you just do your end of play dissections outside the ground each day? We can do some video podcasts between Tests as well. If there’s someone to interview, speak to them. If there isn’t, just speak to each other.”
Works for us. Mike Atherton and Nasser Hussain are the best thing about Sky’s coverage and really this is them at their best anyway.
You need authority and gravitas to do daily Ashes analysis and who knows about having a shit time in the Ashes better than Athers and Nass?
Not only have they been there and done that as players and captains, they’ve followed and commented on pretty much every series since. Crucially, they had occasional successful moments too – or at least know someone who did.
All of which gives a lot of weight to their opinions. They know what a bad decision feels like. They’ve had long days in the field. When Zak Crawley made a pair in Perth, Atherton could tell you just how long the gap between two Test matches would have felt, having made an Ashes pair himself in the 1999 Boxing Day Test. (Long. The gist of his words was that for that whole period, the prospect of another duck is the first thing you think in the morning and the last thing you think at night.)
But rather than piss that hard-earned weight down the toilet by disingenuously latching on to controversial angles, picking fights and manufacturing polemic to raise their own profiles, the two men instead add to it with their fairness and balance.
Spades are called spades but with an acknowledgement that others might label them disgraceful shovels who should be sacked and sent home. They talk up the opposition too. Every Test match involves two teams, after all.
And they see the funny side of all this. The Ashes is a deadly serious silly game. Hussain can stand back and laugh at how a bad day for England can result in a long line of complete strangers hurling mocking abuse at former England captains in the street. Atherton might just be the greatest purveyor of the wry smile who ever lived.
“We’re getting sledged here.”
“It’s not us, you know. We didn’t lose nine wickets!”
Basically, they’re always willing to laugh, without making the mistake of thinking they’re actual comedians. As with their analysis, they walk that line assuredly. Sometimes the self-deprecation tips over just a touch, but only ever for a moment, and far better to relentlessly undercut yourself than go the opposite way.
What is this sort of coverage worth?
Athers and Nass are sufficiently funny and serious and thoughtful and interesting that it doesn’t really matter that you don’t actually get to see what they’re talking about, or that on one occasion the entire video looked like this.
They even had a laugh about that in the next one.
They’re enthusiasts too. When big and unusual things happen, they visibly love it. The value of that shouldn’t be underestimated.
Live Test cricket isn’t on free to air UK TV any more, but Ashes tours never were. Free access to this sort of stuff is therefore a total positive, added to which you can also watch different sized highlights packages – via TNT Sports’ YouTube channel or the BBC’s iPlayer – pretty much whenever you want. Things ain’t so bad.
Except the actual cricket. That’s not the best.
Conclusion
From what we’ve seen of Ashes coverage in Australia, it is a Western Australian rural drive away from being anywhere near as good as these two blokes standing outside a cricket ground, asking each other what they thought of the day.
Maybe this kind of broadcasting excellence is a direct product of losing pretty much every Ashes in Australia for the last 40 years. If that’s the case, well… at least we got something watchable.
More Athers, more Nass…
Pretty sure it doesn’t count as a spoiler if we tell you that both Atherton and Hussain appear regularly in our book, The 50 Most Ridiculous Ashes Moments.
The bookshop.org stock levels no longer inspire confidence, so looks like you’re left with the Amazon option if you still want it in time for Christmas. (Shame on you for not buying it sooner! (But not so much shame that you blame us for feeling bad about yourself and consequently decline to buy our book.))
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