Commentary and Live sports coverage – a happily ever after story?

Live coverage of any sporting event must give us, the audience – Commentary (basically describing the match as it unfolds) and Analysis (as the name suggests, analysis of the events and making sense of strategies/tactics on display). Both these can either be provided by an individual or couple of individuals who blends both these perspectives and take us (the audience) through the ebbs and flows of the game and at the same time build and maintain excitement throughout the match.

However, it seems off late that the narratives are not dictated by events as they unfold but rather seems to be pre-decided and then data is propped up that suits the narrative rather than the other way around.

I am going explore this hypothesis of mine through the lens of sports that I follow - Cricket and Football.

For Football, let’s take my team Man United. Although they are not so behind in points table but there is a preset narrative that they are just bad. Bigger picture – they are 3 points behind Man City, 1 point behind Chelsea, but every time when something happens at United the commentators start talking about job of the manager, however if the same thing happens at City or Chelsea, then it’s about a blip in form or some other perspective but never about the ability of the manager! So, it begs the question, where is the objectivity here? And why different strokes for different folks?

Only plausible explanation, they want to create/ sustain a narrative that can then be fed into respective sports channels pre/post-match coverage or their sports news channels so that they can run it 24*7. Identify themes and amplify it across different media – ‘how long will Amorim last’, ‘ why is he so adamant on system’, ‘he has only proven in Portuguese league and has no wherewithal to do it in Premier League’ etc… this then also feeds fan channels, fan forums and then they start running it with it, which creates this unending and vicious circle of frenzy.

Let’s switch to Cricket.

I think it’s well accepted that nationalities of the commentators do influence the type of commentary you hear.

Take Indian commentators for example, one can hardly find any commentator critical of any Indian player (forget about Captain) on air, as the axe will fall on them and they might not earn their next contract. Add to it, Indian cricketers don’t respond well to criticism either and it inevitably impacts the commentator. So here the question is – what value do they really add? Personally, Indian cricket commentary scene is more like a retirement club of ex-cricketers who talks about on-field events on occasion but indulge more in praise of the cricketers or criticize in a way the seems more like ‘ oh you shouldn’t have done that brother’ instead of calling spade a spade (or) worse still, talk amongst themselves about topics which really don’t add value to anyone!

English, Australian commentators have evolved from their narrative of how bad IPL has been for the game, to now using it to praise the mentality of young crop of Indian cricketers, however they are good at drumming up non-events as events to run a certain narrative like ‘spirit of the game’ or ‘these kind of pitches’ or ‘on their day’ etc, when it suits them. Again, one asks for fairness and objectivity.

End of the day, live sports coverage must engage the audience, not from goodness of their heart but for very survival of sport, as they not only want to grow their viewership by adding new markets but also, to make sure that their audiences don’t switch to other content whilst the game is on. Under both these circumstances, if audiences don’t get a fair, objective, insightful analysis of the game with a touch of excitement, then not sure if either of the objective will be met and relevance of live commentary in the times to come will most definitely be questioned!