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You know what they say. Never judge a pitch until both teams have batted really badly on it. You know what they say. Over here you bat long, bat hard, bat short, bat soft. You know what they say, the Ashes in Australia is all about a hybrid maverick production with a fan-first identity.
Given the brilliance of the basic entertainment on day one in Perth, it was easy to forget that England’s Baz-facing tourists aren’t the only setup with a brave new philosophy in play, out there disrupting the norms, and in need, above all, of a decent start.
“We’re not going to be stale, we’re not going to be traditional.” Not, repeat not, the words of a fully weaponised Ben Duckett. But the words instead of Scott Young, group senior vice president of content at Discovery Sports Europe, which is apparently also TNT Sports, which used to be BT Sport, for whom this was a first Ashes tour in its current guise.
Which is fine. But what does this actually mean? As with most forms of executive-tier media bullshit it appears to be code for cheap disguised as new (see also “agile”). In practice it meant Alastair Cook out under that hard southern sun on day one of the Ashes basically carrying this thing on his back.
Here is Alastair Cook before start of play being made to stand near fans and talk excitedly. Here is Alastair Cook, with no noticeable time in between, suddenly out there carrying the Ashes trophy itself into the middle alongside a small, chiselled angry Jedi elder who turned out to be Justin Langer.
Here is Alastair Cook on the mic calling what seemed to be pretty much every ball of the day, so omnipresent you expected to wake from uneasy dreams and find his head next to you on the pillow talking about scrambled seams, or discover him already downstairs making one of those massive American movie breakfasts with waffles and bacon, engineered solely so a sulky teenager can grab a single slice of toast and leave the house with a roll of the eyes while Alastair Cook talks at length about batting tempo.
By the end the key takeaway from TNT’s coverage of the Ashes was: here we have a bunch of people making the best of a frankly shonky production. The day kicked off with Becky Ives doing an intro in front of loads of old blokes in bucket hats, a tableau that said hybrid, maverick, intertwined. And also: we can’t afford a studio.
It turned out TNT did have a podium, a kitchen counter model already lurking warily on the outfield, in which the entire visual identity of this six-week broadcast must now reside, clung to like the bit of boat they paddle off to the shore behind at the end of Jaws.
Ives carried it off breezily, given this is the hardest TV debut you’re ever going to get, addressing the overnight diehards of the most beloved but also pissily possessive of sports. Let’s get it out of the way. There will be snottiness toward Ives in particular, most of it just because a new person who isn’t Richie Benaud is fronting up a thing that doesn’t look like it used to.
There will be hostility in the internet’s dungeon rooms because the person doing this is 1) from outside cricket; and 2) a woman. The reality is Ives was pretty good. She knows about cricket. She talks fluently and asks good questions. By the end, ranged around the podium with JL, Finny and Cooky it was seamless, easygoing anchor stuff.
TNT really does need a good Ashes. This week it lost the rights to the Champions League. Across the whole platform there’s a sense of something being worn thin, from the same old advert break music here, like the sounds that come out of your Bluetooth speaker when you turn it on, to the huge super-trash QR code that kept popping up next to Steven Finn – just off the plane and also excellent – to the way they’re pushing Cook out in front of everything like the last ceremonial horse of some dying cavalry unit.
Happily the real star of these broadcasts is always the place itself. Watching Australia from the night-time gloom of England there is always that delicious sense of ambient jet lag. The bleached-out colours. The hard white light. The way everything looks harsh but also soft. Starc and Green are stark and green. It turns out the world really is a rock near a star, half of it in darkness.
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There was a first glimpse of this at the toss as Ben Stokes appeared looking tall and trim and captainly: medieval pointy beard, straggly neck hair, shirt already clinging coyly to his arms and chest. “I can tell you when you hug Ben Stokes he feels like pure lean muscle when you’re touching his back,” Finn offered up. Mmm. Sorry. Where were we?
Before long Mitchell Starc was easing in, all pure lines, elite symmetry, bounce and snap. For all the talk of new things, the same things seemed to be happening out there. Zak Crawley nicked off to the sixth ball of the series, a terrible shot for an opener. Harry Brook made breezy runs. Best of all he looked totally relaxed, carrying off that strange mix of old world elegance and over-caffeinated shot selection.
England seemed to euthanise their own innings out of existence, which is one of those things people will talk about coming back to bite you. Australia is always trying to bite you. Spiders, mate. The size of your head. Mosquitoes like zeppelins.
The start of England’s turn in the field was very well called by the commentary team as Jake Weatherald was all but Rory Burnsed by Jofra Archer. And both of the male commentators did a good and very professional job. By the end of this Test perhaps it will even be possible to know their names, or which one is the rugby guy, which the cycling guy. There is already an overload of information in the world. Life is too short to tell the difference, at this range, between Charlie Wangdoole and Bryan Tagnutt.
If at times it felt a bit like overhearing Finn explaining cricket to a nice talkative man, then this is not anyone’s fault in the comms team. An away Ashes is the toughest assignment even for the oldest of hands, even when your own company is in charge of graphics and direction and there’s no maverick hybrid guff in the way.
The cricket, the energy and some excellent bowling carried the day. And no doubt with enough time we will now begin to crave and miss and get nostalgic about these new names and voices, the podium, Finny and Cooky, who really do deserve a proper lie-down in a darkened room. If it’s any consolation, 19 wickets deep already, you get the feeling Sir Alastair might just be out there with his Allen key dismantling the podium before the end of day three.
