Tricky this one, Shiva ( your nick name). It is not about potential, credential or your ability to understand the game. It is not even about your skin colour.
.jpeg)
Nowadays in cricket being glamorous, attractive, having the skill to engage the audience is a prerequisite.
You can have a vast amount of technical understanding of the game. You may have the ability to explain technical nuisance of batting and bowling. The bat angle, transfer of weight, still head, full face of the bat or say grip of the ball, seam position, wrist movement, delivery point. But cricket has evolved, in fact, it keeps on evolving every day.
Just like the cinema the entertainment quotient of cricket, too, has got heavy weightage, especially in T-20s cricket.
How well you can decorate, costumize the situation with your rhyming, impulsive, dramatizing dialogues and commentary, defines your market valuation. Add some anecdotes of past events, then makes it more interesting.
The Audience watches cricket with eyes and ears. Your oratory skill defines how well you can engage them with the game.
Just for a demo:
Recall that famous test match against Australia on Gabba year 2021. Tense final moments at the fag end of the match, Rishabh Pant's heroics. We were on the verge of winning that test. That Rishabh Pant's punch to long off, the ball slowly rolls to the boundary line, and we won that match. Vivek Rajdan in the commentary box describing that running moment. With the adrenaline rush he delivered that famous dialogue with intense emotions "Tuta hai Gaba ka ghamand." This tag line became legendary.
Such emotion-catching comments, dialogues elevates viewership. And today's media is hungry for viewership.
Likes of Ravi Shastri, Sunil Gavaskar, Harsha Bhogale these gentlemen adapted themselves to this transformation quite subtly.
So Sir, your value as a competent commentator has not degraded, but the peers have added relevant marketing skills to make themselves more appealing.
