Test Match Special: Where do YOU stand on TMS?

As we all know, everything in life can be divided into things that make you angry or things that make you amazed. Where does the BBC's Test Match Special fall?

Michael Henderson has written a piece for the Guardian about how TMS is going to change later this year when its current producer, Peter Baxter, retires. Henderson implores the BBC to preserve TMS in its current form with maybe a bit of tinkering around the edges. He imbues the word 'accessible' with pejorative connotations and foresees a nightmare future of lowest common denominator cricket coverage.

Why? It's something of a presumption that any changes to TMS will be designed to hook that fictional everyman who the media so frequently court. Why won't the changes be for the better?

We like Test Match Special, don't get us wrong. We've even warmed to some of its more laughable eccentricities, to a degree. However, it's anything but accessible, in the literal sense. If you were new to cricket and wanted coverage of the sport that you'd recently come to love, you'd be pretty underwhelmed by TMS. It's insular and many of the team are downright offputting to many people. We mention no names.

One of Henderson's main defences of the current team are that several have good, clear speaking voices. If it weren't an article in The Guardian, we'd be tempted to believe that his reference to 'people who speak sloppily' were code for those with regional accents.

Again, we DO like Test Match Special. But why shouldn't an overhaul of the programme be more reminiscent of Channel 4's improvement on the BBC's staid TV coverage several years ago, rather than the desperate pandering to all that Michael Henderson envisages?

Compare and contrast

The English Cricket Board's article on England's win is entitled 'Flintoff Clinches Epic Victory'.

The Australian Cricket Board's version is called 'Confidence Booster For England'.

Manish Bhasin and Rishi Persad

When the BBC made the announcement about its presenters for its new cricket highlights programme before the Ashes, we were understandably preoccupied by the return of Richie Benaud.

Now that the BBC are well into their World Cup coverage, we feel that we've had long enough to evaluate the two brash young bucks entrusted with covering the world's greatest sport on the world's greatest TV station (no adverts - top that).

So here's our evaluation:

Manish Bhasin - crap.
Rishi Persad - all right.

In order to be a little more transparent, we'll attempt to justify that. Manish Bhasin has spent the whole of winter sounding like he's reading stuff. He probably is, but we don't like being reminded of that. When he's on camera, he wafts at the air to punctuate his sentences. When he's off-camera (but still talking), all we can do is imagine him tracing the words with his finger.

His questioning's offered nothing either. Not to us anyway and not to Geoffrey Boycott who was clearly irritated at times during the Ashes. Perhaps it's meant to be 'inclusive' - ie, appealing to new cricket fans - but his questions seem designed with ONLY new fans in mind. The overall impression we get is of a presenter ticking all the right boxes on a BBC progress report.

Rishi Persad's a geek. We like geeks. We're a geek. He seems genuinely enthusiastic about cricket and while Bhasin's occasional stabs at humour have felt hackneyed and formulaic, Persad's have seemed more genuine and warm.

Perhaps it's their respective roles that are giving us this impression. Maybe Persad gets more free rein. Manish Bhasin used to present Football Focus and we see his segments as being cricketised versions of that show. It's a different sport with a different audience. That style just doesn't fit.

We're not actually feeling all that happy about bad-mouthing Manish Bhasin to be honest. We just get annoyed when cricket coverage isn't as good as it should be.

Sky Sports News cover England's loss like complete amateurs

We're gutted about England's last ball defeat yesterday. We sometimes forget how much we really care. We were actually watching the denouement on Sky Sports News in the bar after having played an inferior sport and the tension was killing us. It was also killing a few strangers who clearly weren't full-bore cricket fans.

This is great, we thought. England will win this off the final ball and all these random people will have happy memories of cricket. They'll encourage their kids to play and England will rule the cricketing world for decades. Then England lost.

It was all the more painful for the manner in which we'd had to hear about it. Sky Sports News, as most of you will be aware, is a kind of textual challenge for the viewer. Stuff scrolls across the bottom. Stuff appears on the right. Stuff flashes on screen. The presenter talks about none of these things. It's very disorienting, particularly when you're trying to follow one particular thread.

We were keeping our eyes peeled for where the England score might be likely to flash up next. For some reason, even though it was a nailbiter and there were only four balls to go, Sky still weren't keeping the score in constant view. In fact, they even went to an ad break.

Thankfully, with just two balls remaining, the presenter attempted to describe what was happening. The penultimate ball passed and we had a fair idea what had happened. The final ball was about to take place. The presenter said: "Dihara Fernando runs in and..."

At this point, he left a good 20 second pause. Those of you who watched the match will know that Fernando didn't release the ball. We had no idea.

Richie Benaud returns!

Yes. It's an exclamation mark day: Richie Benaud is returning.

In a world where people actually employ Dean Jones and where Sky only employ ex-England captains, the BBC have done the decent thing and hired the great man as a studio analyst/discussion bloke. They've also hired Geoff Boycott, Jonathan Agnew (a BBC employee anyway) and, hilariously, Tony Greig, who's always worth listening to if he thinks Australians might be within earshot.

There was always a fair chance that Richie 'free to air' Benaud would accept a job at the Beeb, but until it was actually confirmed in writing, we were edgy. Now it's true and the world is a better place. Bizarrely the BBC are focusing on the new pair of anchormen, relegating Benaud to a lower paragraph. If the BBC knew the first thing about marketing, they'd realise that their two biggest draws are Richie Benaud and The Cricket Tune, which has another name, but we're not using it because nobody calls it that.

This is such important news we deliberately used the word 'returns' in the title instead of 'back'. If you don't know what we mean, just put 'back' in the search box on the left and you'll see yet another of our 'repeat until funny' instances of humour.

Willow and Stumpy - Sky Sports' animated shame

We've had our first view of Willow and Stumpy today. For those who don't know, Willow is a talking cricket bat and Stumpy is, not entirely unexpectedly, a stump. Together they explain the ins and outs of cricket for the benefit of no-one. They crop up intermittently during Sky's cricket coverage.

Children know when they're being forced to learn something. They're particularly attuned to those times when they're taught something in a 'fun and exciting' way. Are they so stupid that they can't tell that the subject matter's dull simply because it's being expressed by a talking cricket bat? Edutainment: The worst of both worlds.

If kids are watching cricket they'll pick things up as they go along. There's no real point getting them to use all the correct terminology. They don't care. If they want to play cricket, they just want to play it. They can find out what all the shots are called afterwards.

The only conceivable use for Willow and Stumpy would be a sequence depicting Stumpy being hammered into the ground using Willow's face. The ensuing damage to Willow's visage ought to teach kids to look after the faces of their cricket bats. That's a picture of a cricket stump mallett. Get one. Look after your bat. Or at least use the end of the handle. Cricket bats cost money you know, you little ingrate.