So long, sport

Bob Chaundy
BBC News profiles unit

Some of the best of your impersonations of Richie

He's been called the voice of an English summer, and the cricket viewer's favourite friend. Richie Benaud's "Morning everyone", has been a comforting greeting for any devotee of the sport over the past four decades. Now he is about to hang up the microphone on English cricket.

For 42 years, we have grown up with Richie Benaud's easy-on-the-ear voice dispensing common sense, wry humour and the expertise of a man who captained his country in 28 of his 63 Tests and was the first cricketer to reach the double of 2,000 Test runs and 200 wickets. Yet, he's an Australian.

When Richie Benaud booked himself on to a BBC training course for commentators in 1956, impartiality was drummed into him.

Speaking to me at The Oval, Benaud says: "They hammered the point home to never ever say 'we'. And I never forgot it and it stayed with me for all those years...to say 'we' sounded both stupid and parochial."

The other maxim the BBC taught him was not to say anything in his commentary unless it added something.

"My mantra is: put your brain in gear and if you can add to what's on the screen then do it, otherwise shut up."

Benaud was the first to take 200 Test wickets and score 2,000 Test runs

Benaud cites the former BBC tennis commentator Dan Maskell as his mentor. Rather than describe a great passing shot, Maskell would simply utter the words "Oh I say".

The corporation's racing correspondent, Peter O'Sullevan taught him the value of preparation. Racing is Benaud's other passion. When it's not his turn behind the microphone, he'll invariably be studying the form.

In the flesh, Richie Benaud is as unassuming and demure as his screen presence suggests.

In fact, when I first greeted him, I remarked that he had been one of the banes of my childhood having watched him on television bowl out the England team in the 1961 debacle at Old Trafford.

So undemonstrative was his reaction that I wondered if I'd said the wrong thing. It soon became clear, though, that this was his way, and one which has served him well professionally.

Encyclopedic knowledge

"He's utterly calm and completely unflappable in both his public and private personas," says the BBC's cricket correspondent, Jonathan Agnew. "I know what madness goes on in that earpiece we have to wear, but you'd never know watching Richie."

Talking to Richie Benaud is like consulting a cricket encyclopedia, so extraordinary is his memory.

The master of understated TV commentary

It will have been reinforced by the research he has done for his current book, My Spin on Cricket (Hodder and Stoughton) in which he not only reminisces about the past but tackles just about every current issue in the game.

Benaud says he doesn't believe Zimbabwe and Bangladesh should be given Test status; they're simply not good enough yet.

He is in favour of certain aspects of new technology being used by the third umpire, for instance the "red zone" between the wickets and the "snickometer" to help with difficult lbw and catching decisions respectively.

But he doesn't want a situation in which the third umpire has to deliberate for several minutes on, say, a catching decision which would slow down the game.

Polished performer

He points to the experience of American football in which an experiment with line umpires resulted in so much time being lost that people started walking out.

He cites statistics which show that the number of no-balls has increased fivefold since the front foot law was brought in. "Is there any common sense in that?" he asks.

And he believes a law should be introduced which would preclude anyone but the bowler from polishing the cricket ball.

But in general, Richie Benaud believes the game is in great shape. "In the past two years, I've seen the best cricket I've ever watched. This current Ashes series shades even the great one of 1981."

In that sense, Richie Benaud couldn't be leaving at a better time. He will continue to commentate for Channel 9 in Australia for at least three more years.

And, together with his English wife Daphne, he will still watch cricket here each summer, though well clear of the commentary box. They have a house in the south of France as well as in Australia.

Richie Benaud says he is a "free-to-air" man, and now that the contract for televising cricket in this country has gone to a subscription channel, he believes, at the age of 74, that it's too late to change.

But he won't be drawn on whether this is on principle or merely pragmatism, though one senses he regrets the decision of the English Cricket Board to take live cricket off free-to-watch channels.

So will there be a tear in Richie Benaud's eye when he hangs up his microphone at the end of this Test?

"I'll be sad, not sorry", he says. "I'll be able to say goodbye, thanks for having me and it's been a lot of fun."

And it's been great fun too for all those who have shared his mixture of deftly-timed comments and wry humour.