Worst Commentators/Pundits XI

[uvelocity]

whatever ********

 

[benchmark00]

Bad stuff.

 

[JontyPanesar]

Richie Benaud and Bill Lawry.. Lawry has always been an awfully biased commentator but Richie in recent years has been worse than even Gavaskar.. Combine Gavaskar's bias with a Holier Than Thou , I-know-it-all-coz-I-was-a-great-commentator-once attitude.. Result is that horrible version of Richie we are put through in recent times..

Bill Lawry is biased? Who do you think is objective then? Go through robelinda's channel, there are tons of examples where Lawry defends or takes the side opposing Australia. Think back to the Cronje-Junior incident...or even when Sehwag was initially embarrassing himself at the MCG in '04, or how about his excitement for Monty bowling Langer. If anything, he can be biased against Australia tbh. Lawry has gone a little senile but he's still exciting, fair, and relatively humble about his knowledge of the game.

On Richie Benaud, I thought it best to keep my views on him silent but I'm gonna go for it... he really hasn't been a good commentator for a while now. For someone who touts himself as an authority on legspin, he does a horrible job of explaining the mechanics of legspin. Not saying he wasn't a good legspinner, but you don't have to know how a skill actually works to necessarily be good at it. He clearly didn't know what a slider was or at least how it worked, yet quite authoritatively "...And that's the slider". He thought Warne's sliders go straight on because they had backspin on them...which makes me think he doesn't know what backspin actually is or he didn't really see what the slider was. There are videos of him explaining that the flipper should rotate like a helicopter propeller would, rather than have backspin (as Grimmett defined it). And he clearly does not keep up with the game and follow it closely. Just last year he was talking, during the beginning of the SA tour of Australia about how he thought Tahir was a good bowler...At some point the legspin fetish has to stop; Tahir had consistently proven he cannot find the right length for 4 straight deliveries, leave aside six. Either Richie no longer watches cricket seriously or his judgment of players has gone down the drain. You can chalk this up to isolated flubs, but at some point, it's obvious he's liked because of past reputation.