Ewar Woowar posted:

Legitimately sad. Richie was what all commentators should aspire to in all sports. He was the absolute best.

Butt Wizard posted:

Now Murray Walker is the last of the old-school commentators left 😕

The Deadly Hume posted:

Well that sucks. Now there's really only Ian Chappell and Bill Lawry left from the old school.
@smurray38 on Twitter posted:
One of the remarkable things about Richie is that you would never have learnt of his cricketing achievements from his own commentary

Scylo posted:

Gideon Haigh's obituary for Benaud is worth reading.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/cricket/obituary-richie-benaud-crickets-philosopher-king/story-e6frg7rx-1227298104211

quote:

Richie Benaud was a stranger to winters, experiencing few as a cricketer in a 63-Test career, and none after 1963 when his life as a commentator and critic began. Instead he became a constant of summers in Australia and England as his era’s most celebrated sports broadcaster.

John Arlott has been garlanded as the ‘voice of cricket’; Benaud was indisputably the ‘face of cricket’, being involved in the telecasts of Test matches and one-day internationals by Australia’s Channel Nine, the BBC and Channel Four for half a century.

Behind the microphone, Benaud was mix of the pithy and the oracular, relying on no particular motifs and no special catchphrases. He drew simply on a lifetime’s knowledge, applied pertinently and phrased economically.

In a way, because his opinions so often became gospel, he was as influential as any cricket administrator of the post-war period. In Wisden Australia, Dr Greg Manning once denoted him “cricket’s philosopher king”.

The citation for his 2003 lifetime achievement award from the Royal Television Society summed Benaud’s style up succinctly: ‘No man is better prepared. Never mind the statistician alongside him, providing information — he’s already worked out all the information for himself.

“He also manages to make the modern game as compelling as the old game — every day for this remarkable person is as exciting as the day before.”

Benaud the commentator seldom referred to his on-field experiences and accomplishments — a shrewd expedient which had the effect of making him seem almost ageless — and was amused when young admirers inquired innocently whether he had been a player.

In fact, Benaud would rank among Test cricket’s elite leg-spinners and captains had he never uttered or written a word about the game.

Benaud’s great grandfather Jean was born in Bordeaux and left France for the antipodes in 1840.

Benaud, born in Penrith, grew up in a classically Australian settings: the country towns of Koorawatha, Warrandale and Jugiong where his father Lou spent twelve years as a schoolteacher.

He received his first bat at the age of four, cut from the timber of a packing case; he played his first competitive game as a six-year-old on a coir mat pitch with a compressed cork ball.

Youthful memories influenced him strongly, both the recollection of listening to radio broadcasts of cricket from far away, and the dawning awareness that Lou had sacrificed his own cricketing aspirations for the sake of stable employment. Benaud remembered his father’s vow to ensure that any sons of his would have the chance to make a cricket career.

As a teenager out of Paramatta High School, Benaud then worked in an accounting firm where he met his first wife Marcia Lavender, but where he was sacked when his absences playing cricket intensified after selection for New South Wales in January 1949.

This, too, left a mark. Benaud was critical of the sacrifices his semi-amateur cricket contemporaries had to make in order to play, asserting as far back as 1960 that ‘some players ... made nothing out of tours’ and that ‘cricket is now a business’ - statements prefiguring his progressive attitudes to cricket’s commercialisation when he was a commentator.

For the initial five years of his Test career, which began in February 1952, Benaud was something of an enigma.

He spun and hit the ball hard, and caught superbly in the gully. He exhibited the same positive charge as his idol Keith Miller.

But the dean of English cricket writers, Neville Cardus, found him ‘inexplicable’, capable of deeds “which nobody merely talented is able to do”, but then guilty of “gross and elementary errors”. His returns were modest: twenty-seven matches, seventy-three wickets at 28.9, 868 runs at 20.7.

The trajectory of Benaud’s career altered utterly with seniority. Upon Australian captain Ian Johnson’s retirement in October 1956, Benaud became his country’s chief slow bowler.

Under the leadership of Ian Craig in South Africa a year later, he practised tirelessly and ripened rapidly, taking 106 wickets at 19 and scoring 817 runs at 50 in eighteen first-class matches on tour.

When Craig contracted hepatitis on the eve of the 1958-59 Ashes series, Benaud took his job with alacrity, impressing with his tactical legerdemain and irrepressible self-confidence.

Before the Tests, it was rumoured that England’s captain Peter May had advised his players: “Play Benaud down the line. He won’t worry you.” He had been thinking of the old Benaud not the new; Australia’s captain claimed 31 wickets at 18 in the 4-0 series victory.

Benaud’s strengths as a captain extended beyond all-round skill and tactical acumen. He led by both example and empathy, inaugurating the custom of pre-Test dinners, contending that “cricketers are intelligent people and must be treated as such”, and recommending “an elastic but realistic sense of self-discipline”.

Players reciprocated his trust. He had greats in his corner, such as Neil Harvey, Alan Davidson and Wally Grout. But he was adept at getting the best of modest talents too: on the 1961 Ashes tour, eight players made two hundreds or more, and nine took 40 wickets or more.

Benaud was equally popular with crowds and critics. Usually bareheaded, shirt open as wide as propriety permitted, he was a colourful, outgoing antidote to an austere, tight-lipped era.

Jack Fingleton likened Benaud to Jean Borotra, “the Bounding Basque of Biarritz” over whom tennis audiences had swooned in the 1920s; he has been credited with originating the demonstrative celebration of wickets and catches that is today de rigeur.

As a journalist himself — for some years an ambulance-chasing police roundsman on Sydney’s Sun - Benaud was also masterful in the presence of the media, even hosting them in the Australian dressing room.

“I never knew him to squib an awkward question,” remembered the Australian cricket writer Ray Robinson. “He often came up with answers that defused harmful slants ...

“In public relations to benefit the game, Benaud was so far ahead of predecessors that race-glasses would have been needed to see who was at the head of the others”.

Benaud’s cricket and public relations zenith was Australia’s 1960-61 series against Frank Worrell’s West Indians, encompassed Test cricket’s first tie and perhaps its tensest draw.

In the captains’ public commitment to entertain with fast scoring and over rates, Fingleton wrote, they “set an example which other cricket countries will ignore at their peril”. London’s Evening News acclaimed Benaud as “the cricketer who has done most to restore life to the game”.

The vibrancy of the cricket actually proved something of a false dawn, though Benaud’s leadership in the Ashes series in England in 1961 again occasioned admiration, particularly the fightback he engineered at Old Trafford when the hosts were 2-150 on the last day requiring only 106 to win at not quite a run a minute.

Benaud, having taken 0-40 from 17 overs, told his vice-captain Harvey: “We’ve had it as far as saving this, Ninna. The only way we’re going to get out of it is to win.”

Indulging a hunch by coming round the wicket to exploit loose turf outside the right-hander’s leg stump, he retained the Ashes for Australia with a matchwinning 5-13 from twenty-five deliveries. After the tour he was made an Officer of the British Empire.

Benaud’s reputation as a gambling captain has probably been overstated. On the contrary, he planned fastidiously and executed clinically. English writer Alan Ross thought that there had ‘never been such a calculating cricketer’.

Off the field, likewise, he impressed as planning his life to the finest degree. “As a person,” commented his successor Bob Simpson, “I think he planned every move from the time he got up to the time he went to bed.”

This forethought was evident in Benaud’s transition from player to pundit when he retired from cricket in March 1964 with a then-Australian record of 248 Test wickets at 27, 2201 runs at 24.4 and unbeaten in a series as captain. He had already explored his options meticulously.

After the 1956 Ashes tour, Benaud had undertaken a BBC television training course, studying the commentary styles of the likes of Henry Longhurst, Peter O’Sullevan and Dan Maskell in order to understand sport ‘from the commentator’s point of view’.

He then accepted BBC invitations to England in 1960 as a radio commentator and in 1963 as a television commentator, between times writing the books Way of Cricket (1960), Tale of Two Tests (1962), Spin Me A Spinner (1963) and columns in Sydney’s Sun and London’s News of the World.

Ultimately, astute as he was in print and on radio, television was Benaud’s calling, suiting his captain’s spontaneity and intuition. He was authoritative but not pedantic, dignified but not pompous, and never spoke unless he had something to say. He was so popular that many humorists strove to imitate him, so distinctive that none ever quite got him right.

Again, too, Benaud was broader than the average broadcaster. In 1969, he published the wideranging Willow Patterns, and left the Sun to form a sports marketing consultancy with second wife Daphne (cricket writer E.W. Swanton’s secretary, whom Benaud married in July 1967).

Long-held Benaud views about professionalism obtained an outlet when D.E. Benaud & Associates was recruited by Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket in April 1977.

This controversial breakaway circuit, wrote Benaud, “ran alongside my ideas about Australian cricketers currently being paid far too little and having virtually no input into the game in Australia”. And as consultant and commentator, he contributed inestimably.

To the organisation, he brought cricket know-how; to the product, he applied a patina of respectability. He was the front man to changes wrought in cricket over two years - night play, coloured clothing, the white ball, field restriction circles, even television coverage from both ends of grounds - that would have taken decades under the game’s existing institutions.

The crowd in excess of 50,000 at the SCG’s first night match in November 1978, he wrote in Benaud on Reflection (1984), was something he’d not forget ‘until the moment comes to make my way to that great vineyard cum cricket ground in the sky’.

Benaud’s work estranged him from some in cricket’s establishment. He described the period as one of “making new friends and losing old acquaintances”.

But in a way, he joined a new establishment, a sporting-industrial complex that came to hold almost as much sway over cricket as its nominal governors.

And while great players came and went, Benaud remained, always spruce, never at a loss, pervading cricket in both hemispheres, and spanning generations.

Though he published three other compilations of his views on the game, The Appeal of Cricket (1995), My Spin on Cricket (2005) and Over But Not Out (2010), and a somewhat reticent memoir, Anything But ... An Autobiography (1998), he was finally identified almost exclusively with television and its tropes.

Channel Four changed many aspects of cricket coverage in England when it replaced the BBC in 2000, but made sure to recruit Benaud as a signifier of continuity.

He was its senior commentator for another five years, finally signing off to English audiences at Oval, whereupon the crowd and the players of both sides stood as one to salute him.

In Australia, Benaud seemed to be continuing into perpetuity when his half-century of broadcasting was curtailed by an accident. In October 2013, aged eighty-three, he crashed his 1963 Sunbeam Alpine into a wall near his Coogee home, sustaining painful breaks.

This entailed a lengthy convalescence, punctuated by talk of comebacks that never eventuated. His voice was last heard in an Australian cricket ground at Adelaide Oval in December: a moving recorded recitation of a tribute to the late Phillip Hughes.

By passing away himself after one of Australian cricket’s longest summers, Benaud ensured, as ever, that the game took precedence.

Scylo posted:

Airstream Driver posted:

Where does he get all his footage from?

Airstream Driver posted:

Where does he get all his footage from?

HJB posted:

RIP Richie "Benno" Benaud

Knuc U Kinte posted:

Classy tvnz playing clips of him ripping into the chappels after the underarm thing.

Airstream Driver posted:

Richie was the best

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIL6KZox6Ao

Airstream Driver posted:

Richie was the best

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIL6KZox6Ao

Scylo posted:

Robelinda uploaded a Richie Benaud video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7o2KTxK6a4

IceAgeComing posted:

richie was very cool and we need more people like him

Mister Chief posted:

IPL minute of silence needed more pyro.

Brett824 posted:

Man, it's fun to watch Faulkner massacring Mitchell Johnson's bowling.

Scylo posted:

I think this is the most I've ever seen of Benaud bowling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG4PU4aZmOk

Scylo posted:

I think this is the most I've ever seen of Benaud bowling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG4PU4aZmOk

goatface posted:

So many shirts open to the navel. Truly it was a golden age.