I think for those that can see it on Sky cricket is just non stop now. England have gone from their Winter Test series to the T20 World Cup to the summer test series in the space of a month - and I expect there will be something in the schedule between the end of the summer tests and beginning of The Ashes too. And Sky Sports cover the lot - perhaps they're even bored of it now.
I think this is partly why Channel 4's coverage was so good. They came back refreshed and reinvigorated each summer, making hugely innovative coverage. The same is true of Five now, who make the perfect highlights package, mixing features, analysis, the story of the day and all the main action, to the right balance. This was something that Sunset + Vine never got right with C4 (I remember their highlights being quite good in 1999, but the narrative style took over in 2000 and gradually became the Mark Nicholas Show). The other thing that I like about Five is that they are willing to talk about all cricket stories that come up and should be talked about, not just the England games that they have the rights to. You could imagine C4 ignoring the World T20 victory completely, and not mentioning the county matchfixing story. Even though Five have only 45 minutes to play with, they managed to fit all of these in. I just wish that they would pull their finger out and bid for some winter highlights too.
Well the Five team is basically the old C4 team - so not a huge change in direction, and I'm sure those issues would have been covered over the coverage - I don't remember C4's coverage being confined to just what was happening in the games they showed.
Fair enough on that point, but I certainly feel that highlights were the poor relation on C4. Mark Nicholas couldn't be fronting live links and recording highlights ones at the same time, so they dealt with that issue with the silly voice-over linking it all together, meaning that there were more slow motion replays than actual cricket, and events were shown in the wrong order. IIRC, the BBC got over that issue by having different presenters for the highlights and live stuff at the end of their time (Tony Lewis for live, Richie Benaud for highlights), and Sky have a separate team doing highlights for them now. Obviously I can't blame C4 for not putting up the finances for another method, or Sunset + Vine for having to do them that way, but I think that it's pretty clear that their highlights for Five are so much better, just because it's the main focus. Comparing the 2005 and 2009 Ashes DVDs confirms that for me straight away.
Incidentally, while we're discussing cricket coverage, I stumbled on this (
http://vimeo.com/7951226) the other day. Was it ever used on air (I can't remember it), or was it just a conceptual thing? (I realise that many of the shots were used in the first set of titles that I remember, but some I think were not, and the editing is subtly different.)
