TNT Sports have hit a new low – their half-baked plan to cover this year’s Ashes from 10,000 miles away is another dumbed-down insult to long-suffering England fans

I am not, as far as I know, a masochist. But I have voluntarily watched near-enough every ball of England’s last few Ashes series Down Under.

And that should be punishment enough, shouldn’t it? Witnessing a coterie of our finest cricketers being physically peppered and psychologically tortured until they finally disintegrate like the burnt bail in the Ashes urn. It’s 13-0 Australia from the last 15 Tests over there, by the way.

But no. The hardest part of the last eight years of Ashes misery in Oz hasn’t been staying up into the early hours to see Rory Burns lose his leg stump off the first ball of the series, or Steve Smith grind his way to yet another ton, or even Scott Boland take six for seven — six for seven! — at the MCG.

It’s having watched it all on TNT Sports.

Since beating Sky to the rights for the 2017-18 series, as part of an £80million, five-year deal with Cricket Australia, TNT have provided a comprehensive lesson in how not to cover live sport. And their bizarre plans for this winter’s series, unveiled yesterday, suggest they may well be about to hit a new low.

Back in 2017, TNT were still BT Sport and still had the good grace to at least pretend to take their cricket coverage seriously. They actually bothered to send a team to Australia, with Ricky Ponting – a superb analyst – Geoffrey Boycott and Michael Vaughan part of their high-profile punditry detail Down Under.

They entrusted commentary duties to the likes of Alison Mitchell, a trailblazing broadcaster with vast experience on Test Match Special. Their coverage as a whole wasn’t particularly slick, and all felt a bit amateur hour in contrast to the previous offerings on Sky Sports, but it was at least an attempt at doing something similar.

Unfortunately, TNT Sports stopped trying some years ago. Luxuries, such as sending commentators to actually cover the sport, are a distant memory. After all, a TNT subscription is £30.99 a month for the humble punter, and why should they expect the channel to do the bare minimum in return?

For the 2021-22 Ashes, TNT offered no more than a few pundits in a London studio some 10,000 miles away from the action, with their commentary feed taken directly from Australia’s Fox Sports.

Because there’s nothing a bleary-eyed English cricket fan watching their side getting thoroughly spanked at 4am likes hearing more than a gaggle of giggling Aussies.

Worse still, because Fox Sports were catering for, well, Fox Sports viewers, they would frequently show clips from other matches for which TNT did not have the rights, leaving UK viewers to stare at a blank space. Oh, and the ad breaks didn’t match up, meaning commentators were constantly cut off or cut to mid-sentence.

If that sounds bad, TNT didn’t even bother with UK-based studio analysis between sessions for England’s tour of New Zealand last year. Instead fans had to make do with pre-recorded puff pieces about Kiwi players, while for the first Test against India in January 2024, Matt Floyd had to host the production single-handedly, off-screen. Floyd did an admirable job in absurd circumstances, by the way.

TNT’s coverage of the upcoming Ashes sounds like a weird amalgam of their crimes of Christmas past. Some of their presenters – namely Sir Alastair Cook and Becky Ives – will be based in Australia, but lead commentators Alastair Eykyn and Rob Hatch – neither of whom have much cricket work under their belts – will be back in the UK.

Now Eykyn and Hatch have a good reputation in rugby and cycling respectively, but a commentary team with next to no cricket experience and separated from their pundits by several quite large oceans does not bode well. Not to mention their inability to see anything other than what their monitors are showing them.

Scott Young, executive vice-president at TNT’s owners Warner Bros Discovery Sports Europe, insists that Eykyn and Hatch are ‘huge cricket fans’ and that viewers ‘won’t know’ where commentators are during live action. Hmmmm. 

Picture this not-very-hard-to-imagine scenario: Harry Brook takes a swipe at a well-directed Josh Hazlewood bouncer and the ball goes flying up in the air. How will Eykyn or Hatch know whether it’s heading for six or there’s a gleeful Aussie fielder waiting underneath it? What if another delivery is dispatched towards the boundary, the camera follows it, and the commentator can’t see the giant mix-up in the middle as both batters are caught at the same end?

Young also made a point of saying TNT’s coverage needs to appeal to those who aren’t cricket fans.

‘That’s why we’re bringing many of our sports broadcasters into the fold,’ he went on. ‘It’s about bringing the football, rugby, even fight-sports fanbase, and making them aware of the Ashes as a moment in time. If we can get people who are not normally going to watch cricket for a day or a Test, then that’s very much part of the TNT Sports ethos.’

Sorry for questioning the ethos, Scott, but UFC fans wanting to dip their toe into cricket – and there’s an army of them, of course – don’t tend to do so in the middle of the night.

You know who is watching cricket in the middle of the night? Cricket fans, who might just expect to be catered for, for once.

The sport may be an acquired taste but it has a large and dedicated fanbase, especially when the Ashes comes around. It doesn’t need to be dumbed down in the vain hope of appealing to those who aren’t interested. Suddenly the feed from Fox Sports sounds rather appealing.

We have, in fairness, been spoiled by the cricket coverage in this country. Since hoovering up the rights in 2006, Sky Sports have consistently shown how to ‘do’ cricket properly, marrying genuinely insightful analysis with eloquent, likeable broadcasters who know their subject matter inside out and share the odd laugh without it devolving into the confected ‘bantz’ that infects so much of sports broadcasting in 2025.

Mind you, even Sky’s output is some way below the standards set in its heyday. There’s fewer Tests shown, the county cricket coverage is a shadow of its former self.

Their commentary booth has suffered for the loss of Michael Holding, Shane Warne and David Lloyd, for various reasons, some tragic, some self-enforced.

But Sky remain a very safe pair of hands – and, in Nasser Hussain and Michael Atherton, have arguably the two finest sports broadcasters in the country. Watch a few hours of a Test match on Sky, and you will come away more knowledgeable about cricket and altogether happier about life.

The same cannot be said for TNT. I fear more Ashes pain awaits.