Dour-Darshan

How exciting would it be to watch a closely fought India-Australia cricket match on TV? Not if it turns out as one-sided as the present Future Cup series or if the match is being shown on Doordarshan. The most irksome thing on DD is the extended commercial break during the overs. The break starts somewhere just after the batsmen has played or missed the last delivery, when the ball is still in play. Never mind if a boundary was scored off it, we’re never going to see the umpire indicate a boundary because, for all Doordarshan’s pledge of public service (for which they went to court demanding free feeds of all cricket matches played in India), the bottom line is money. In the break between the overs, Doordarshan squeezes in three or four Ads at the expense of live cricket while other private channels show a couple of Ads and present the total scoreboard of the batting team or the bowling figures of the bowling team, or even give a piece of trivia about the game. By the time, Doordarshan finishes its break and resumes live coverage, the batsman is walking out with his gloves in his hand or the people are cheering loudly for what was either a four or six and you, with no clue as to what has transpired, are left fuming at this absurdity. The best part is that the DD commentators, sitting in the studio and not in the stadium, also do not have an idea of what has happened and are just as clueless.

It is a good thing that Doordarshan receives live feeds from other private channels who have paid a staggering amount to win the rights because Doordarshan is totally inept at broadcasting any kind of live programme, forget a live sports event. I still remember those days when they had the monopoly over cricket telecast in India; they used to cover a one-day match with about four cameras operated by what I’m pretty sure must have been some primates with no comprehension of the game. A flick off the legs by the batsman to fine leg, and the camera would be focusing on the long-on boundary in search of the ball; and for a ball that had been stopped in the covers, the camera would continue on to the boundary, search a while for the ball and then return to show the fielding team celebrating for the batsman would have been run out while you were being shown the image of the cover boundary.

The last but not least reason why I hate watching a match on Doordarshan is the commentary. It is bad that they don’t have competent English commentators but what they try to pass off as Hindi commentary is utterly repulsive. The pre, mid and post match analysis programme (quite aptly called the “Fourth Umpire”, for it is as worthless as a fourth umpire is in a match), with a wannabe bimbo, Anjum Chopra, thrown in, in an attempt to spice up things, reminds me of eulogy at a funeral where the speakers are forced to say some good things about the dead man who was a rascal and who probably fornicated with their daughters. If Atul Wassan and Chetan Sharma’s cricketing acumen was less, their commentating skills are non-existent. Along with Arun Lal, Dilip Doshi and Nayan Mongia, they could drive a cricket lover to bludgeon himself with a broken stump. From trying to improvise with Hindi versions of English aphorisms like “Catches Win Matches” which got metamorphosised into “Pakdo Catch, Jeeto Match”, a "choti gendh" for a short-pitched ball or with the tried and tested Hinglish statements like “Mid-off ke upar se lofted drive lagaaya hai, Behtereen Shot” or the appalling "Ball ne tappa khaaya aur batsman ne chakma khaaya", their stupid opinions starting with "Mere Khayaal se, Arun..." and time and again showing that they are stuck in a time warp by their lack of knowledge of the intricacies of the modern game, they take the fun out of watching cricket on the telly.