The day the sky fell in
Sky Sports is generally reckoned to have done a decent job replacing Channel 4 in covering the cricket in England in 2006
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They proved themselves utterly inadequate. They lacked even one person, a Benaud, an Arlott, even a Christopher Martin-Jenkins, who could bring journalistic qualities - an inquiring mind, a hunger for information, a desire to explain - to the occasion. They could tell us next to nothing about what was happening behind the closed dressing-room doors. More seriously, they failed to give the events any wider context.
As former star players, still deeply embedded in the game's culture, the Sky commentators rigidly observed its codes of omertà during that dramatic day at The Oval. In so doing, they failed their viewers.
Martin Williamson is executive editor of ESPNcricinfo and managing editor of ESPN Digital Media in Europe, the Middle East and Africa