CMJ

Cricket has lost much of its romance with television. A couple of decades ago one could listen, on radio, to Gundappa Vishwanath, late cutting Derek Underwood to the third man boundary past a diving Kieth Fletcher at second slip or even a Jeff Thomson bounding in to bowl to terrorized English batsmen on a bouncy Perth wicket. It was romantic because you had to imagine the action! TV robbed us of that and reduced our heroes to mere mortals. Radio commentating was an art and for over three decades Christopher Martin-Jenkins enthralled us with his comic, wit and understanding of the game of cricket. Jenkins was a tad eccentric too.It is true that on a golf course in Jamaica he tried to ring his office with the TV remote control he had picked up on his way out of his hotel room. Even when he recognized his mistake he seemed disgruntled that the device did not get him through to London. He had a distinctive style and he would compare cricketers to birds and animals. Mike Hendrik had a pigeon toed approach to bowling while Ravi Shastri resembled a Camel while he ran! Jenkins had this rather condescending approach to Indian cricket befor 1983. In the World Cup that year,he was fairly certain that England would beat India in the semi final and i could hear the quiet desperation in his voice as Mohinder Amarnath shut the Poms out of the tournament. In the final against the might of the West Indies India were shot out for 183 in just over a couple of hours on a green top at Lords. There was a finality in the voice of Jenkins.....the upstart was being put in place....and when India turned it around there was genuine incredulity and joy for the under dogs lead by Kapil Dev. CMJ was a consummate broadcaster. His clipped, precise tones soon became synonymous with the English summer, as did those wonderful stories that he told, whose end could be so hard to predict - often he was not quite sure where they were heading himself. He was brilliant on the radio: clear, distinctive, and always at ease in front of a microphone, even if he had only just burst into the commentary box seconds before picking it up. Jenkins died a few days ago from cancer and will be missed by many. I will too, for the romance that he created around my favorite cricketers, who were but mortal humans I discovered with the advent of TV in India!