Date-stamped : 30 Mar95 - 10:33
Boycott beefs up on Sky again - Jon Henderson

MY ATTEMPT to wind up the man from Sky   by   jeering   at   him,
`See you`ve got Boycott back on board then,` brought the neat re-
ply,

Last October Sky dropped Geoff  Boycott  from  their   commentary
team  for  England`s  Ashes tour of Australia. I suggested at the
time it was because the satellite station`s new signing, Ian Bot-
ham, and Boycott were as inert a pairing as fire and rocket fuel,
but have learnt since that the more explosive combination  of   a
Yorkshireman  and  his  brass  (in this case too little) may have
been the reason.

So why are they back together for   Australia`s   tour   of   the
Caribbean,  which  gets serious next Friday with the start of the
Test series?

Sky had no choice. The  independent  production   company   Trans
World International are covering the tour, and he who renamed the
great game `creee-ket` - as in `England can`t play creee-ket`   -
came as part of the package.

Whatever they think of Boycott,  Sky   Sports   subscribers   are
likely to be disappointed that the satellite station have decided
to screen only edited highlights of the Test series despite  hav-
ing shown the five one-day internationals live.  Warne v West In-
dies promises to be one of the great cricketing contests  of  the
Nineties  - and we`ll be reading about it on Ceefax before seeing
it on Sky.

Cricket`s  television treatment over  the  next  12  months   re-
flects just what an expanding state the medium is in. Live cover-
age of this summer`s home Test series against West Indies will be
on  the  BBC,  the winter Test matches in South Africa on Sky and
the World Cup in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka next February  and
March on Wire TV.

Wire are the cable station  whose   lifestyle   programmes   have
just  been  sold to Mirror Television and whose prospects are now
very much linked to sport. Their backers coughed up pounds 5 mil-
lion  for cricket`s  1996 World Cup and, unsurprisingly, will use
it to promote their new sports channel, details of which will  be
announced shortly.

Source :: The Observer
<END> Contributed by Ram.Krishnan (rkrishna@garnet.acns.fsu.edu)