The Lone Non-Cricketer in the Cricket Commentary Box

I first heard him in the winter of 1991. He was doing commentary on Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) radio during the India Australia Test series (yet to be christened as the Border-Gavaskar Trophy (BGT). His Indian accent was not too difficult to decipher amid the unmistakably Aussie accent of his fellow commentators. “Who is the man, BTW?” I wondered. For someone who had got hooked to the beautiful game while still in his teens, it was an affront of sorts not to have known an Indian commentator with such a wonderful, sonorous voice with just the right diction and pronunciation to go. I thought – mistakenly as it turned out later – that I knew every Indian commentator in English (or Hindi, for that matter) of the time; Anant Setalvad, Dr Narottam Puri, Suresh Saraiya, Dicky Rutnagar (who popped up every time India played in West Indies), even AFS Talyar Khan on Radio Australia. But this man flummoxed me.

I tried to listen carefully while his fellow commentators passed on the mike to him – or he passed it on to one of them - hoping to catch his name. But it didn’t help. In the best Australian tradition, they would just address him by his first name and the way they pronounced the first name with their quintessential Australian twang, it was heard to decipher the name. It was years later that I came to know that the man who had created so much curiosity in a die-hard cricket fan on that cold December morning was none other than the man the cricket world now knows as Harsha Bhogle.

His longevity has been nothing short of amazing. In a world now manned completely by top notch former cricketers, it takes some doing to survive as the lone non-cricketer on the commentary box. Despite his non-cricketing background, he is at perfect ease with each one of them; now picking their brains on a technical point, now pulling their legs or engaging in friendly banter. But the best thing about him is he know his limits – both in terms of his knowledge of the game and in his interactions with his fellow commentators, who are the greats of the game – and never tries crossing those limits. No wonder the pundits of the game are equally at ease with him. His friendly disposition, pleasing demeanour and his disarming toothy smile - whether in the commentary box or at the post-match presentations - have become so much a part of the viewing experience of the cricket watching Indian public that the commentary box appears incomplete on the rare occasions when he is missing from it. Those ‘rare occasions’ have invariably been the fall-out of run-ins with some BCCI mandarin or the other, with their inflated egos.

By a strange coincidence, our man from Hyderabad happens to be on air to describe some of the most memorable moments of Indian cricket in his inimitable style, frequently waxing lyrical. I, for one, would always remember the way he described the fall of Ricky Ponting’s wicket – caught in the slips by Rahul Dravid off an unrelentingly hostile Ishant Sharma - in that famous Perth victory in 2008. Here is roughly how it went. “Ek aur over karoge?” asks captain Anil Kumble. “Karunga”, says the 19-year-old Ishant Sharma. And geez, what happens next? He gets Ponting, the best Australian batsman by a distance, out first ball, ending an hour of torture!!” His cheerful exterior, however, disguises a proud Indian, who would never allow someone to have a dig at India, even as part of banter. During the Champions Trophy final at Edgbaston in 2013, his fellow commentator Michael Atherton, tongue firmly in cheek, said; “It is England but India has more support in the stadium and the pitch is completely assisting your spinners. Says a lot about our hospitality, right?” Pat came the reply from the proud Indian. “Well, we let you rules us for two centuries. Says a lot about our hospitality, right?” His impromptu one-liner describing a trademark Sachin Tendulkar straight drive: “Open the text book. Turn to Page 32.” It is moments like these that stay in memory, to be savoured years later. And along with the moments stays the voice that brought them alive for us.  

There are some people who detest, saying he is too verbose or accusing him of ‘verbal diarrohea’. But that’s what commentators are paid for (to talk), isn’t it? In any case, cricket broadcast has come a long way since the days the staid Doordarshan when commentators were under instructions to pause more than they talk – apparently because the viewer is watching everything on screen! The commentary box badly needs the fun and banter that Harsha provides amid all the high-funda talks by the experts analysing the game and its technical aspects.

For an engineering graduate with a management degree, Harsha Bhogle has made a truly remarkable career switch – to the commentator’s box – and has made a huge success of it. He does plenty else too; hosting quiz shows on TV, running his YouTube channel, writing books and columns for several publications, including the ‘Sportstar’ (from The Hindu stable) and so on. But it is his avatar as a television commentator that the Indian cricket lover would remember him most for.