Ultimate reality TV
In the Sunday Telegraph Mike Atherton jumps on the Big Brother bandwagon and also draws on the recent Herschelle Gibbs controversies to say that cricket is the ultimate reality show.
Andrew McGlashan
25-Feb-2013
In the Sunday Telegraph Mike Atherton jumps on the Big Brother bandwagon and also draws on the recent Herschelle Gibbs controversies to say that cricket is the ultimate reality show.
Players have long known that their every move – every suspicious thrust of hand in pocket, every touch of nail on ball – is open to scrutiny. The more recent advent of stump microphones, intended to bring the sound and fury of the game to the viewer, means that a player's words, and therefore his thought processes and character, are open to scrutiny, too.
Meanwhile, this week England announced the seven-man panel who will try and work out what when wrong during the Ashes series, a few other things besides. The chairman is Ken Schofield, the former chief of the PGA Golf Tour, and in the Sunday Telegraph Scyld Berry tries to find out a bit more about him. However, he says that even this review committee is unlikely to be radical enough.
When Schofield said he brought passion alone to the party, he was not quite correct. Parallels and analogies are not always useful but this one might well be. Working out of a small office at the Oval, where he met men of Surrey like May and Stewart, Schofield built up the European Tour in the same way that English cricket has to grow if it is to match Australia's
Andrew McGlashan is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo