Friday, March 16, 2012

WSH fails to connect and innovate

Written on: 9th Mar '12

The World Series Hockey might have been branded as the only saviour for the otherwise declining Indian Hockey, but unfortunately, it looks like the projected-professional league has a lot of gaps to be filled up.

Notwithstanding the fact that a die-hard Hockey fans will take whatever comes their way in form of LIVE telecast and watching their favourite players play, but lack of quality in various aspects of the event, makes it look like a fairly ordinary show.

A Battalion of unfit players: Remember any star player of the last decade and you have the pleasure to see those rubbing shoulders with young players in WSH.

Sadly, most of them are unfit. Even when there are rolling substitutions, almost all these stars are far from fit to play high quality, exciting Hockey for a span of 6-7 minutes. Interestingly, there is no concrete reason for these players to be unfit. WSH has been on the anvil for at least 4-5 months before it actually started. If the players didn’t work on their fitness in this while, then who is to blame?

Disjoint units: Almost all the teams are namesake ‘teams’. They hardly have co-ordination between their flanks, forwards and linkmen. Seeing the composition of the teams and their (foreign or Indian) coaches, one fancied that a given team will exhibit shades of European Hockey or Australian Hockey or aggressive Indian style Hockey or may be, skilful or tactful Hockey. Unfortunately, the Hockey being witnessed in this tournament is a hotchpotch, nowhere close to the fan’s delight.

Arguing players: Young players are inexperienced but when the star and experienced players argue on every call by the umpire, one feels, ‘Dude, its OK. Come on. Lead by example, please!’

Flip the channels and watch the game: Ask a layman and they will concede that Hockey is a fast game where two goals can be scored within a minute unlike other team games. However, Hockey in WSH is slow and mostly excitement fizzles out as the game enters the last quarter. Unlike high competition Hockey there are no last minute equalizers or match winners in the dying minutes of the game, thereby, leaving the game as a low on the excitement quotient. When that happens, the viewers tend tochange the channels between the games.

Monotonous commentary and presentation: In WSH, there are very few commentators and hardly any expert panelist. Ones who have been brought in, many a times fumble with their sentences spoiling the show. With so many teams involved, one should have at least 5 experts who can offer variety of opinions. Also, the experts hardly predict the winners and what to check out the match for.

And talking of commentary, if one puts the Hindi Commentary channel then you need only one: either the visual or the audio. The reason being, Hindi channel commentary is radio commentary. English commentary is definitely tolerable but far from the international standards.

Poor Camera angles: Many a times, the camera focus is far from the area of action, contributing to an ordinary viewer experience.

Non-Innovative coverage: The less-than-average viewer who has little knowledge of Hockey and wants to get interested in Hockey has hardly anything to look out for. Who all are the players playing a game remains a maze for the viewers? Visuals explaining the position of players are missing.

One of drawbacks of Hockey telecast is you never get to identify with the players who are on the field and what’s their role? For a naive viewer, they are just ball rotators. Even though circle penetrations, shots at the goal, penalty corner statistics are shown regularly on the television but this is too technical for a common viewer to understand and generate interest in Hockey.

Little for traditional fans: LIVE side-line talk with the players, what coaches instruct during the breaks or what umpires talk during the referrals are missing from the game. Moreover, what was the game-plan of the coach in a match remains unknown as, apparently, there are no after-match press conferences?

4 comments:

Vinod said...

Hindi commentaries were the grace and were sheer delight to listen and its funny as since 1988 seoul olympics we have heard rajesh Tiwari in television only and now to say its like Radio...shows your Bias as you write your blog in english

Vinod said...

Hindi commentaries were the grace and sheer delight.one is listening to the Great Voice of Rajesh tiwari in hindi since 1988 Seoul Olympics in television only...and you say they sound like radio...needs upgradation on your audio senses. also since you write in english...must you be so biased towards english...did you not notice that we can not understand any word of english commentators as they were in Australian accent???how can you be fine with such english????

Vinod said...

Google

How can you have a blog where our comments require owners approval??? do n't you think it should be freely available for any one to comment??

Shashank said...

Dear reader, thanks for coming by to my page.
Your fascination and appreciation for the Hindi commentator is appreciable but I copy-paste what I wrote:
And talking of commentary, if one puts the Hindi Commentary channel then you need only one: either the visual or the audio. The reason being, Hindi channel commentary is radio commentary. English commentary is definitely tolerable but far from the international standards.

I did say English one is far from international standards.

One must watch some international Hockey matches (and espacially the one where India is not participating, like Champions Trophy) to understand that commentary is about opinions on strategy and 'not-so-obvious' things for a viewer.

Even if ANY English commentator says the English translations of things like:
ek khiladi ko beat kiya .. doosre ko paas kiya ..
pata nahin woh kya karna chahte they ..
aaj yeh baal kata ke aayen hain ..
prashansa karni hogi ...
yeh khatarnaak ho sakta hai ...

- I will still have the some opinion on the commentary.

World Series Hockey was meant to be international level tournament where everything was of World Class quality. One needs to evaluate things from that perspective.