‘A commentator [Tony Cozier] needs to be easy to listen to over a long period’

From espncricketinfo  An interview by Subash Jayaraman

Excerpts from “Couch Talk”

Subash Jayaraman: You had an early start to your career in media and journalism at the age of 15 since your father was already in the business, wasn’t it?

Tony Cozier: Yes. My father edited three papers in the West Indies. In fact, four of them. The Voice of St Lucia, Trinidad Guardian, Barbados Advocate and the Barbados Daily News, which he started himself in 1960. He had also covered the West Indies cricket tour to England in 1950 for West Indian newspapers. He didn’t continue in cricket journalism because he became an editor, so he didn’t have time for that.

SJ: You just happened to be around and wanted to give it a shot, or did he ask you to take part in it?

TC: I suppose being from Barbados and being male, everyone here at that time played cricket up to some level and was interested in cricket. In addition, my father was a devotee of the game. My present from him on my eighth birthday was a copy of Wisden. My interest was from the time I was at the Lodge School in Barbados. We had had a few students who represented West Indies in earlier times. In fact, John Goddard was West Indies’ captain for 22 Tests. We listened to commentary from England. I read a lot of people, like EW Swanton, for instance, when I was at school. At that time, the three major grammar schools in Barbados played in our first- grade competition against the top clubs. I know I would have played against clubs which included Test and first-class players. In fact, the first match I played for the school at that level was against Spartan Club, which included Wes Hall and at least two or three players who had represented Barbados. Cammie Smith, who represented West Indies, was also playing in that team.

SJ: What do you consider your role and position were as a white man during the struggle for self-governance and independence for the Caribbean nations in the 1960s?

TC: Well, I never even thought of it like that. When I started in journalism it was all sport, not just cricket, although cricket was naturally the major sport. Between 1960 and 1968, when the paper was taken over by the Thomson Group, I did everything on the Barbados Daily News, as you have to on such a paper with a circulation of around 10,000 on an island with a population of 250,000 at the time. When the Daily News closed, I had to find something to do. I then became the East Caribbean correspondent for several overseas publications, and I would go around the Caribbean doing radio commentary on regional cricket while using the opportunity to interview ministers and various officials outside of cricket, or following up current affairs stories for the various overseas agencies I worked for.

As far as being a white man, my father was white and he was the editor of newspapers in three different islands. For many years, up until a few months before his death, he wrote a daily column on a wide range of topics. That he was white was something he never really thought about, and neither did I. Like he was, I was West Indian, full stop.

When I was touring in my earlier days, a lot of the players were people I had played cricket against at club level in Barbados, those who I had known for a long time, who became friends and are still personal friends. I never felt at any stage that my race made a difference. The West Indies is a very cosmopolitan part of the world and the team reflected that.

When West Indies were playing in Trinidad against New Zealand in 1971, New Zealand were bowling, so there were only four West Indians on the field. The batsmen were Roy Fredericks, a left-handed opening batsman of African descent, and Geoffrey Greenidge, a white West Indian from Barbados. The two umpires were Ralph Gosein, of Indian descent, and Douglas Sang Hue, a Jamaican-Chinese. That encapsulated how cosmopolitan West Indies were at that time. The mix on the field is now between Afro- and Indo West Indians, but all races are represented in other areas, such as administration.

SJ: But cricket was used as a vehicle for realising self-power, governance and transformation.

TC: Britain was the colonial power and held the political and financial control. It meant a hell of a lot for the confidence of the West Indies people that cricket was the one endeavour in which they could prove themselves the equal of the British, who, after all, invented the game. We took a long time before we won a match in England but the team kept improving with experience. We got Test status in 1928 and 1930 was when West Indies first won a Test match over England. The real watershed came in 1950, when West Indies went to England and won the series there 3-1.

It was a time when the West Indian immigration to England had started to peak. Thousands of West Indians went to Britain at that time and settled there. They were discriminated against. When the West Indies team, their team, came to England and beat England, it gave them a tremendous lift, it meant a lot to their self-esteem. Also, it inspired a lot of their politicians who had already been pushing on to full independence from Britain.

SJ: Listener Sriram asks: What did you think – at the time – of West Indies’ 1976 tour of England and Tony Greig’s “grovelling” remark? And what is your take on it now, almost 40 years since, about the allegations of “sinister” bowling by some English journalists?

TC: It was, of course, a silly thing for Tony Greig, a white South African, even if playing for England, to have said, in relation to a virtually all-black West Indies team, especially at a time when global opposition to apartheid in South Africa was at its height. That certainly fired them up. It was a fast bowling attack. You had Roberts, you had Holding, you had Wayne Daniel. But as far as so-called sinister bowling was concerned, that wasn’t confined to England alone. It wasn’t that West Indies were specifically taking their own back on the old colonial power. West Indies were the best and were just out there to win and maintain their standards.

SJ: These days, except for you, Fazeer Mohammed, Harsha Bhogle and Chishti Mujahid from Pakistan, there are very few commentators who don’t come from an international cricket background. Is that a good thing – where you don’t have a play-by-play commentator coming from a trained journalism background and a colour guy from a cricket background?

TC: I really couldn’t comment on that, except to say that you are referring solely to television commentary. The late Brian Johnston and John Arlott are two of the finest examples of those who didn’t play cricket at any standard but were outstanding commentators. I don’t think you have to have been an international player to understand the game.

Other things are required as far as commentary is concerned, both radio and TV. I’ve just reread something Christopher Martin-Jenkins wrote under the heading, “Do you want to be a commentator?” One of them, which a lot of people need, he says, and is easily overlooked, is the most important of all necessities for cricket commentators: to have a voice that is pleasing to listen to.

A commentary stint is about 20 minutes duration. The voice needs to command and hold the listener’s attention, which doesn’t necessarily mean [having to turn] the volume down. Commentators need to be easy to listen to over a long period. That is not always the case as far as some of the ex-players who have come in. The ex-players can certainly speak knowledgeably from personal experience, but I don’t think most know as much of cricket history and detail as those who are involved in it on a day-to-day basis. That is my job.

SJ: I want to bring out an example of the bottle-throwing incident in Barbados in 1999, when Australia were touring. It was you on the air explaining the situation, and I quote from the Daily Mail – you managed to be “condemnatory without being portentous”.

We see David Gower hosting everything, or a Sanjay Manjrekar or Ian Bishop doing it all, but you need to have play-by-play plus a colour commentator who is an ex-cricketer.

TC: Possibly, yes. But I cite the case of Richie Benaud, who is probably the game’s most universally respected TV commentator. He was captain of Australia in the 1960s, a top Test player. Yet the last generation of viewers have come up knowing Richie Benaud only as a great cricket commentator. He has made a reputation as a commentator because he was good at it and the public likes his work. If there are more like that, that’s great.

SJ: There are a couple of listeners – Bharathram and Rizwan Patel – who ask: Can an average man/woman aspire to be a cricket commentator in this modern era? If you haven’t been already established, is there a window for them to come into the game?

TC: No, there isn’t. Unless they are in newspaper work and their work is seen and they then graduate to radio. Fazeer Mohammed, myself, Harsha have all done that. You need to be in the game and be known to be in the game by those who select. Sadly radio now seems to be more and more completely overtaken by television.

SJ: How do you think the art of cricket commentary has evolved during your tenure as TV commentator?

TC: I did television long after I was on radio. Brian Johnston, with whom I did Test Match Special in England, was very influential. The first thing he said was that you’ve got to have fun. You are on the air, you have to enjoy it. If you are not enjoying it, then the listener won’t enjoy it.

Then I came into television commentary at the start of Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket on Channel Nine in Australia. David Hill was the producer then. He also emphasised what Johnston said – enjoy yourself, have fun, you are free to do what you want to do, make your jokes, you can do nonsense once you keep on the cricket. The television once went to the full moon in Sydney. Because I had the backing of David Hill, I just sang “Blue Moon” on TV. You know people are going to be entertained once you accept that the cricket is first and foremost.

Now, with T20 cricket, we hear Danny Morrison. He is completely off his rocker, but that’s a really good way of saying it. He is not perhaps ideal for Test cricket but he is ideally suited to T20 cricket because of his style.

SJ: T20 leagues have made cricket into a product. You said you weren’t comfortable with some of the things that you were asked to say as a commentator.

TC: When I went to the IPL, I just didn’t know what it was all about. We got there and there were all these product placements that you had to do. I wasn’t comfortable with that. I didn’t understand at that time but now I understand it. It is a new form of the game that you have to adapt to. You had to adapt to 50-overs cricket from Test cricket. When you do T20, you are not doing Tests.

SJ: Shoaib and Mohit ask: What is it that you had to do different in adapting to, perhaps, commentating during the CPL recently?

TC: Of course, T20 is a lot faster than Tests, even 50 overs. There are a lot more sixes, a lot more fours, than you would get in Tests. A six is big excitement. You get a big crowd. Fireworks, dancing, cheerleaders. The lot. The commentary should reflect that.

As far as the radio was concerned, the top Australian commentator Alan McGilvray, said to me from the time I did my first Test match commentary with him in the series against Australia in the West Indies in 1965: “Always beat the crowd. Don’t let a wicket fall and [be in a situation where] people are reacting with the usual noise and the listener at home is saying, ‘What? What is going on?’ You have to beat the crowd.”

His technique as a radio commentator was that when the bowler ran in, he would turn his attention from the bowler, two paces before he was about to deliver, and shift to the batsman. For instance, “In comes Dennis Lillee to bowl and (two paces from his delivery, you go to the batsman), Viv Richards is… forward, drives, cuts, hooks, pulls, is bowled, or whatever.” He was there, with the batsman, ready to describe what he does with the ball when it reaches him. The English commentators’ technique is to wait on the bowler to deliver and then say, “He bowls.” It means they lose a split second by the time the ball gets to the batsman. They tend to be just that little bit late on a dismissal or a four or a six and the listener at home is wondering, “What is going on?”

SJ: Dilip asks: Do you remember any particular commentary stint due to a particular knock or bowling spell?

TC: It was just one over but certainly: there was Devon Malcolm to Vivian Richards in Barbados in the Test in 1990 when Malcolm was, as he could do, bowling very fast and Richards typically took him on. In that particular over, Richards top-edged over the keeper’s head, hooked him for six, cut him for four and then one flew past his nose. The over cost 18 but the crowd at Kensington Oval absolutely loved it. They were in a frenzy and I was caught up with it.

As a commentator, these are the moments you live for: a one-on-one confrontation, with the tension very high, between a very fast bowler and a great, aggressive batsman who was always going to take him on.

The next over, the captain at the time, Allan Lamb, took Malcolm off. That just punctured the balloon just when everyone was waiting for more. A friend of mine keeps a lot of old videos, and when I went to meet him in London when we were there for the Champions Trophy, he put this on said, “Do you remember this?”

There were so many more. Jeff Thomson bowling in Barbados, again to Richards, and to Greenidge and Kallicharran – an hour and a half of sheer magic. It was lightning-fast hostility, Richards taking him on, and eventually Thomson getting him. That was the kind of thing that really lifts your commentary, gives you a thrill, an adrenaline rush.

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