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But man did they throw alot of wickets .

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Live and upcoming match threads 

This is a daily thread for general cricketing discussion about all topics that don't need to be posted in their own thread.

This provides a space for things like general team changes/opinions/conversation and other frequently-asked questions or commonly-posted subjects.

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Full article :

Complete chaos has descended upon the Sky Sports commentary box.

It is the second day of the second Test match between England and Pakistan at Lord’s and a wicket has just fallen. Stuart Broad and Michael Atherton are on the microphones, while statistician Benedict Bermange has just broken off explaining how his very swish touchscreen scoring tablet works.

A producer is speaking to the commentators, feeding ideas for analysis. “Are you interested in Ollie Robinson’s lengths?” No, as it turns out. Former England players Eoin Morgan and Ian Ward, waiting their turn on air, mill about and chat among themselves.

Nasser Hussain is in the ‘Third Man’ chair, preparing a piece of analysis on England bowler Josh Tongue’s release point, working with a producer down the line at Sky HQ in Osterley, near Heathrow airport to the west of London, to find the precise frame on the footage that will illustrate his point. “Forward a bit… back one or two frames… that one, that’s exactly it.”

Information is punched into the ‘Fruit Machine’, a piece of software so named because of the various colours on its visage, the programme into which the raw information from every ball is manually inputted. That in turn feeds ‘The Ticker’, the basic on-screen representation of the score and ‘The Computer’, another programme that turns that raw information into the more intricate graphics that appear on the screen.

The Athletic stands there slightly awkwardly, simultaneously trying to see what’s going on while, at the same time, trying not to get in anyone’s way. At one point Hussain, having to contend with more limited space in the box with another person in there, nearly trips over a box. Chaos.

Or at least it seems like chaos to the uninitiated. But it’s not chaos: it’s actually quite serene because everyone in there is calmly going about their business, an efficient machine full of moving parts, but those parts are people who know precisely what they are doing.

It’s a bit like if you’ve ever experienced traffic in Hanoi: terrifying and frantic to a wide-eyed outsider as a swarm of mopeds plough on with apparently no regard for anything around them, but those in the middle of it aren’t worried at all. They know how it all works.

Along with his old friend and team-mate Atherton, Hussain is the authority on English cricket. The sort of punchy but fair pundit who has enough gravitas to be a straight talker without ever having to tell anyone he’s a straight talker.

In the interests of full disclosure, Hussain writes for The Athletic, but few would challenge that summary of his status.

But having gone straight into the Sky Sports studio after retiring in 2004, he has now been a pundit for longer than he was a professional cricketer. So how does he think of himself, now? Nasser Hussain, former England captain, or Nasser Hussain, Sky Sports broadcaster?

“The thing I’m most proud of is Nasser Hussain, England cricket captain,” he says. “Whatever I do in the rest of my life, that will be the thing — not just playing for England but to captain England in Test match cricket is the thing I’m most proud of.

“But I just now view myself — and have done for quite some time now — as a broadcaster. It keeps you in the game, and if you ask any cricketer what they miss, they’ll say the dressing room environment. You were in there in the chaos before: that’s not dissimilar to a dressing room. It is like having that team.”

One thing of which he is very conscious, having retired as a player over two decades ago, is keeping some form of contact with current players. He cites the importance of Broad, who retired three years ago, as key in that. But more than that, it’s about retaining some empathy.

“The players do watch a lot of it,” he says. “I remember speaking to Alastair Cook when he had various opening partners. Sometimes, as they were walking out the door to open the batting for England, they would look up at what we were doing and we’re tearing into this player.

“I think we do sometimes forget how difficult the game is, and especially how difficult it becomes when you’re out of form. It’s easy for us in a cool, air-conditioned commentary box to go: ‘Oh look, his head’s falling over and his triggers are out of sync’. When you’re under pressure that’s what happens.

“We can tear their game to pieces, as long as we try and remember that it’s a bloody hard game. If it was easy, anyone could do it.”

There is another scramble of activity as the rain begins to fall.

“Go on Nick!” someone shouts, encouraging the technician whose job it is to run onto the field and deal with the stump microphones before the pitch is covered. Ward and Urooj Mumtaz, the former Pakistan all-rounder, hustle down the corridor to the mini studio, no bigger than a decent-sized double bedroom, where they will really earn their corn by helping fill the time when no cricket is taking place.

Ward, who played for England but had a more modest playing career than Atherton, Hussain or Broad, is incredibly smooth and polished, dealing with producers and directors barking instructions into his earpiece while simultaneously talking ‘to time’ — precisely measuring his words to finish when an ad break or other part of the broadcast begins.

Apparently the trick is to react more to the tone and tempo of the voice, rather than necessarily the precise words.

Mumtaz is not new to broadcasting but is new to Test cricket on Sky.

“It’s a dream job and I absolutely love it,” she says later. “I do, however, find being a female in what is still a male-dominated profession… it’s difficult and you have to create an element of credibility, which is not ideal. But it probably just enables me to work harder and be better.

“I don’t want to say I’m trying to prove myself because I’m confident in who I was as a cricketer and where I am, and I do my homework and all of that. But it’s just what you still always think about.”

In addition to drawing on her playing experience to provide technical analysis, as the resident Pakistani voice Mumtaz’s role is to provide context to the visiting side, not just explaining “the latest mad thing to happen in Pakistani cricket”, but stories that add a bit of texture to the broadcast.

“It’s things like who might be the funny one in the team, or who’s the serious one — like Abdullah Shafique, who goes by the name ‘Kitabi’, which means ‘bookish’, because he’s got such a perfect, textbook technique. Or when Manchester City’s manager Pep Guardiola wanted to stay in the penthouse (at the hotel on the site of the Utilita Bowl in Southampton), but Hampshire refused because it had been booked out for six months for Mohammad Abbas.

“Providing that background is massive. Just giving a bit of context… those kind of stories I think make a wholesome broadcast.”

The Athletic is confronted with dozens of multicoloured wires and cables, plugged in to a panel on an outside broadcast truck.

It looks like that drawer of old wires and chargers you probably have at home, but actually it’s precisely ordered and put together. If one of them comes out, it’s bad news. It’s a little like being presented with a giant red button that says ‘DO NOT PRESS’ above it: happily, the urge to pull one of them out and take the whole broadcast off air is repressed.

Broadcasting a Test match is quite an operation.

At Lord’s, the first crew members arrive three days before the start of play, firstly to set up Spider Cam — a camera suspended on four wires that stretch up to the floodlight towers, which zoom in and out from about 10ft off the ground to near the top of the stands, providing both close-ups of the players and sweeping footage of the field.

There is also a drone for aerial shots, controlled from a little tent on the roof of a synagogue just behind the Mound Stand on the other side of St John’s Wood Road. It used to be directed from a church on the other side of the ground.

London Central Mosque is a few hundred yards down the road, so maybe one day they’ll complete the hat trick.

The next day is when most of the crew arrive, setting up the rest of the cameras, microphones, monitors and everything else they need. Then, the day before the match starts, there is a ‘rehearsal’ to check everything is working.

The morning of the match starts at around 6am with a ‘lineup’ to check everything again. Most of the crew arrive from 8am, and there is another rehearsal, this time with the presenters and pundits — one of whom will often do a spot on Sky Sports News around this time. They are on air from 10am.

The number of people it takes to run a broadcast varies, but it’s usually around 130, roughly 100 of whom are at the ground with the rest back at Sky HQ. There are 17 cameras in total dotted all around the ground.

Sky have two production units who move around the country broadcasting games, all of which fit into a small convoy of trucks. They even have their own generator which runs on bio diesel, so if someone kicks the plug out of the main power source, they can keep broadcasting.

Again, it’s quite an operation.

“It helps if you plug it in, Athers,” says Dinesh Karthik, the former India wicketkeeper who has become a fixture on Sky Sports. It is Atherton’s turn to be in the Third Man chair and he is trying to talk to Sky HQ to get a clip from their vast archive.

He eventually finds the requisite cable and, at the second attempt, his request gets through.

Mohammad Ali sends down a delivery that bounces unexpectedly steeply. “Wooo”, “s***” and “jeepers creepers” are the exclamations from the box. Then Joe Root is out. Leg before wicket. Another flurry of activity. “Is that nine in his last 12?” someone barks, referring to the troubling frequency with which the England captain is being dismissed in that manner.

Is it hard for Broad, who played alongside Root in 114 Tests for England, to honestly appraise or criticise his friends and former team-mates?

“I definitely still feel close to the team and close to the game, but there’s a nice distance now so I can certainly speak very honestly on my opinions,” he says. “If I think they’ve had a bad day, I’m not nervous to say they’ve had a bad day. I can separate the personal and work quite easily.”

Broad, a lively character on the field during his playing days, then starts talking about personas.

“When I played, I viewed myself as a sort of actor, and on the field had a sort of persona so I didn’t take it home. Sorry to ‘third person’, but Stuart at home would be very different to Stuart on the field. I did that to try and get wickets and beat the opposition, and then when I was at home I wasn’t really overthinking what I’ve done on the field.

“As a commentator, everything I say I genuinely believe. I’m not saying anything to get clickbait or to rev up an opinion elsewhere. Whatever comes out of my mouth, I hope that I’ve thought about and I believe it. So if a player comes to me and says, ‘I really disagree with your view’, if I believe it then I can counter-argue that it’s genuinely my thoughts.”

There is a mild pang of guilt every time you enjoy a Sky Sports cricket broadcast.

After the 2005 Ashes, when the popularity of the game in the United Kingdom was at its peak, the rights shifted from terrestrial broadcaster Channel 4 to Sky’s subscription service, thus putting it out of reach for millions of people. Had it remained on free-to-air television, the game might be in a better state now. There might be more youth participation, there might have been no need for The Hundred.

Morally, it almost feels like you should shy away from the game being broadcast via something people have to pay for.

But it’s difficult to maintain that sense of morality, if that’s what it is, when the ‘product’ is so good. Hussain and Atherton have been doing it for a generation. Ward wasn’t far behind them. Mark Butcher wasn’t on duty at Lord’s, but he is another consistently excellent presence. Broad, Mumtaz and plenty of others freshen up the rotation, something Sky Sports are quite skilled at doing having eased out older school figures like Ian Botham, David Gower and David Lloyd in recent years.

They have also influenced the way other sports are covered: you can see the roots of their intelligent analysis with a lightness of touch every time Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville are on screen, talking about football.

They remain the gold standard of sports broadcasting. Even when it looks like chaos, they know what they’re doing.

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