by Arthur Crabtree » Wed Oct 05, 2011 10:13 am
Funny how personal commentator choices are. One man's voice of reason is another's loathsome fool.
Some favourites mentioned here actually, literally make me reach for the off switch. O'Keefe's whinnying neediness. Boycott's bullying, narcissistic bellow. Blofeld's utter incompetence is bewildering. What are the BBC thinking of? When his commentary goes around the world, I feel embarrassed.
Others can annoy for years, but one day i detect a self deprecation, or that they have a sense of their own strangeness, and I'll start to like them. Chief among these is Coney, and his dry, didactic, schoolmasterly descriptions of the slight alteration of cloud conditions, or other. But he sends himself up. Or Greig (he's really got this one, it's gone for miles, but, no, hold on, he's out, it's bowled, all over the place...).
The oleaginous, and quite creepy Mark Nicholas might have followed that path, but his likeness to despotic ideologue David Cameron has cut off that possibility.
My ATG, that fair, earnest, humble enthusiast, Alan McGilvray. Or poet, and a serious man, John Arlott. Today, the funny and informed Vic Marks, who would be a national treasure if cricket was more popular.
I always say that everybody's right.