Jonathan Agnew, an intermittently excellent fast bowler, turned out to be a consistently excellent broadcaster, whose skills and growing stature helped lead the programme almost seamlessly through the deaths of Frindall, Christopher Martin-Jenkins and now Tony Cozier, all well before their powers might have waned. There was a rocky patch in the mid-to-late s. Clouds appeared during the last years of Baxter's long, sunny reign in the shape of men in suits who wanted the measured tones of TMS to match the zippier style of Radio 5.
The rota had indeed become too much of a closed shop. But Baxter was pushed into giving young men from the sports room their commentary debuts, whether he was convinced by them or not. Among those was Arlo White, a highly competent broadcaster who was chosen for the post Ashes tour of Pakistan, and then for a couple of home Tests. White had played for Leicestershire Unders, but when he commentated in his head it was on football, and he readily admits he was not exactly Swantonian in his grasp of cricketing lore and history.
Mountford himself seemed to make a shaky start. The commentary team settled down, but the summarisers went a bit haywire. Now there was a cacophony of voices, many brought over from Mountford's previous berth on Radio 5, and not all the voices were any good.
But it fell into place quite rapidly. But his sharp cricket brain and sharper wit have been a huge plus. For me, there are lingering issues. There is the Geoff Boycott problem. Geoffrey has now discovered that cricket is indeed a team game, and judges it as such; I'm not sure he has cottoned on that the same applies to commentary.
There also seems to me too much movement in and out of the box, too many different voices in too short a time, the key changes stifling the melody. Mountford insists this is unavoidable. Now it's more like a jigsaw puzzle. I've got so many other outlets to worry about. They're dodging to 5 Live, Radio 1, Radio 2. They might have to nip out of the ground to do TV news, because we don't have the rights, and the cameras are not allowed in. The big change is social media.
I might have to get Graeme Swann or Michael Vaughan to do half an hour on Facebook, taking questions from the audience. But on the whole TMS is in rude health. Mountford hears nothing but support from the BBC hierarchy. Now the internet takes it across the planet. Though Frindall was the master statistician of his generation, he had no love of computers and no patience with weird stats.
Andrew Samson and his extraordinary database give radio the lead in off-the-wall facts: "Player most often out for two in a one-day international? Just wait a moment. The most interesting commentator of the new generation is Daniel Norcross, who made his Test debut at Edgbaston last summer. Norcross made a living for a while playing pub quiz machines, had a spell in the City, and drifted in and out of dot-com jobs before setting up Test Match Sofa, an anarchic internet-based non-rival to the real TMS: a group of blokes watching TV and chatting, with the ECB going berserk and accusing them of destroying the world of sporting media rights.
He finally wrote a hopeless gissa-job letter to Mountford, who had a hunch Norcross could do it. I think so too: he has knowledge, enthusiasm and a smile in his voice. Even more improbable is the one-day scorer Andy Zaltzman. It is not unusual for TMS to be a route into comedy gigs; Zaltzman has done it the other way round. But he is a serious scorer nonetheless.
He was a classic public-school master of his generation: benign and humorous, but deeply conservative. Some thoughts on the Daily Mail article this morn. To keep being dragged into this kind of conversation purely because of the colour of my skin and gender is quite frankly tiresome and only serves to create division.
I only have sadness that this should be deemed newsworthy over something more positive and inspiring. I think some of the female cricketers would have had a better strike rate than he did.
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And what really happened the night after the Ashes? Joined on stage by TMS presenter Jonathan Agnew , hear how the team kept their emotions in check on-air at the World Cup Final and find out what life is really like watching England from the finest seat in the house.
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