Sport on TV: Sri Lanka dish up buffet bowling for Rohit Sharma

It won’t be long before someone gets a double-hundred in Twenty20 match

Indian batsman Rohit Sharma (Getty Images)

The captains were presented with an enormous cake before play began on the fourth one-day international in Kolkata to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the ground (Sky Sports 2, Thursday). Within a few hours they were also celebrating 200 and 250 as Rohit Sharma broke the record for highest score in an ODI. He had his cake and ate it. Then he took everyone else’s slice as well. Sri Lanka’s Thisara Perera, who dropped him on 4, must have wished the ground would swallow him up.

Sharma got 264 but he started quite slowly and only reached his half-century in the 23rd over. At that point a statistic appeared on screen that on that day in 1983, the Indian Sunil Gavaskar overtook Geoff Boycott as the leading run-scorer in Test cricket. How inappropriate that two of the slowest, most boring batsmen in cricket history should crop up – Gavaskar, who was commentating at the time, was the man who opened the innings in the first ever World Cup match in 1975 and was 36 not out off 60 overs by the end. He didn’t mention that fact.

In the last year or so we’ve seen the fastest Test hundred and the quickest hundred in any form of the game. It won’t be long before someone gets a double-hundred in Twenty20 match. Boycott’s grandmother wouldn’t be able to do with her stick of rhubarb.

The television will be revolutionised too. Welcome to the future; it sounds like this: “Simon, ball missing leg stump. You have to change your decision from out to not out. You’re on screen now. Thanks.” Not quite “the eagle has landed” or “one small step”, and hardly like landing on a speeding comet.

Those were the words of the TV umpire Billy Bowden to Simon Fry, the on-field umpire for Australia versus South Africa (Sky Sports 2, Friday), the first time the officials’ communications have been made public. So much time is spent agonising over the Decision Review System, they might as well get rid of the commentators now and just listen to the umpires. It’s still better than Mark Nicholas.

Of course what we really want is for the stump microphones to be turned up so we can hear how nasty England’s bully boy fast bowlers really are – from the safety of the sofa.