04-08-2025
In a crowded field, Stuart Broad has emerged as Sky Cricket's new all-rounder
An excellent day's cricket that could and maybe should have been a stone-cold classic, superbly covered on Sky Sports, and it fell to the channel's emerging star man Stuart Broad to ask the question that fans were all thinking on Sunday evening when he wondered: 'Still 20 minutes away from possible start time, everyone has their sunglasses on at the train station. Felt the supporters deserved to see a finish to that Test Match today. Felt a lazy decision to call it off at 6pm in my opinion. I wonder who makes it?'
Broad was right to query whether the umpires and ground staff could have done more, nailing the key moment of the evening's narrative, and with an eye for the provocative as well: further evidence that he is shaping up to be the complete all-rounder in his media career in a way he once, briefly and thrillingly, threatened to be on the field of play. As long as Varun Aaron doesn't reinvent himself as a TV critic, there seems to be no stopping Broad's frictionless glide towards cricket media world domination.
It is to the credit of Sky Cricket head honcho Bryan Henderson and the team that, even in the strongest talent line-up in British sports broadcasting, Broad is already a standout. They had identified Broad while he was still playing, they blooded him during some lower-profile matches with an arm-around-the-shoulder approach and have developed him. It is clear Broad himself has the brains, ego and work ethic to want to get seriously good on the TV. He is also adept at the social media and not shy of putting himself about a bit, be it doing a book called, natch, Broadly Speaking (interested), running upmarket pubs (sure, why not) and flogging his own-label South African rosé (perhaps not).
He is already holding his own against quality technical analysts like Ricky Ponting, Nasser Hussain and Michael Atherton, and is also charismatic and telegenic enough to do the more knockabout features as well. There was a fun segment on Sunday lunchtime where Hussain and Broad went around the home dressing room at the Oval, with Broad offering countless little nuggets about which players sit where, who are the biggest bat-chuckers and so on. He pointed out a poster the players attach to the wall to make sure they always feel they are the owners of the space, the home side. 'We take this poster around everywhere… I say we. The team,' said Broad, and then caught himself again when he began to say: 'We have to make – England have to make…'
"Stokesy is the messiest by a country mile, Rooty is the tidiest" 😅
Stuart Broad and Nasser Hussain show us round the England dressing room at The Oval!
— Sky Sports Cricket (@SkyCricket) August 2, 2025
That said, he doesn't strike you as one of these former players who remains stuck, unable to move onto the next stage of his life, hanging around the dressing room literally or metaphorically like a sad-case sports Fonzie. He is still clearly personally and sportingly close to the current men in the arena but shrewd enough, outwardly anyway, not to seem like he's pining too much for his era, the in-my-day trap that has ensnared many a former great and made them a commentary box bore. Based on what he has said during this series, the telly role has been the ideal soft landing: 'I have walked into a new changing room,' he said of the Sky Studio. 'I am getting into a new groove, improving. I don't miss being in there [the England camp] but I wish everyone the best of luck.'
This superb Test match has had a bittersweet flavour because of the celebration and memorial for Graham Thorpe and while his suicide, as all are, sounds like it was multifactorial and complex, cricket lovers might have found themselves ruminating about the huge and distressing changes that these former playing greats have to go through when they are ejected from the only life they have known: being a person, sadly, turning out to be even harder than being a Test cricketer. Sky, as it has done with issues of racism in cricket, leaned into the Thorpe moment with compassion, finesse and heart. Its cricket coverage remains the gold standard and, for this viewer at least, a more enticing proposition for a day's watching than the £185 ticket price for the Saturday at Lord's.
A 39th Test match for Joe Root 🙌✨
🎙️ "A truly magnificent cricketer in the form of his life"
— Sky Sports Cricket (@SkyCricket) August 3, 2025
We will no doubt be seeing a lot more of Broad. And, as Atherton reported from the Oval, not just UK viewers: 'A piece of news from Australia that seems to have gone down like a bucket of sick with the locals', that Broad has signed up to commentate for that country's Channel Seven during the Ashes. Atherton reminded Broad that the Brisbane Courier Mail
