Ball-by-ball with pen and paper

Technology has made such rapid strides that it’s difficult to imagine there was a time when, leave alone seeing live pictures of cricket matches, even getting live audio commentary was a struggle. During New Zealand’s tour to South Africa in 1953-54, it was decided that each of the five Test matches should have audio commentary reaching out to the cricket fans in New Zealand. The thought was excellent, but implementation was an issue: just a day before the first Test, SABC, the local broadcaster, realised the signals reaching New Zealand weren’t audible.

Enter Dennis Done, who is nearly 80 now but is still on the job, following the ICC World Twenty20 for SAPA. Back then he was with SABC, and upon him fell the task of implementing an innovative idea. The task, though, was humungous: it needed someone to write out the action which took place every ball, and then telex the information over to New Zealand, where it would then be read out as audio commentary.

Cricinfo’s ball-by-ball commentators will tell you how tough it to do a day’s commentary, but Done did it over five Test matches, writing out whatever happened on each ball by hand, and then telexing it across 10,000 miles. “So I have done commentary for five full Test matches without anyone else supporting me,” he says, “and people heard my commentary without hearing my voice. The lag was about six to seven overs, but it worked.”

His most lasting memory of the cricket, he says, is from the second Test, played over Christmas and Boxing Day at Ellis Park in Johannesburg. On the morning of the second day, news filtered in that Bob Blair, the New Zealand fast bowler, had lost his fiancée in a train crash. He was needed to bat on that day, though, and added 33 for the last wicket with Bert Sutcliffe. “Bob walked out with his head bowed and his bat dragging behind him,” Done recalls with a gleam in his eyes. “The crowd was absolutely quiet, so quiet that I was moved to write ‘The sound of a pin dropping here will reverberate across the entire stadium’.”

Done did a great job through the entire series, and was rewarded with a full page report on his performance in the New Zealand Listener. Today, of course, technology has ensured that the pen and paper approach has become almost redundant.