I'm sorry, but I hated the commentary. I know you are not supposed to say these things here, but it is my opinion. The picture was excellent, though. Too many things to say, not enough space, I'll stick to the essentials.
1. Knowledge of facts. Commentators are supposed to have all the facts of the matches that have been played before, and at least know enough about the players to avoid basic mistakes. They should guide you through the statistics in a manner that makes it easy to catch up, and that shows interesting trends/rivalries. Mixing up players/matches, forgetting where they are from etc is just unprofessional. And causes confusion in the viewer.
2. Knowledge of shots. Bad calls etc. Nuff said.
3. Annoying clichès. Jim Wych does basically the same commentary every match, his comments are all interchangeable. Ok, he doesn't stumble over the words and does a decent job creating "exitement", but it gets really old after a while. I wondered for a while if his commentary might be some sort of secret Turing test, a computer generated commentary to see if people can tell the difference, that's how bad it has gotten.
I don't like the others either. To me it seems that Matchroom handpicked people for their speaking voices, not their knowledge of the game. They may at one time have been good players, but they clearly don't know (or have forgotten) professional patterns and percentage play, or have such crappy monitors that they cannot tell what is going on. Sure, they point out the blindingly obvious, but a commentator should see the hidden dangers, the neat solutions etc. The bar has been set high by the commentators of the past (Grady, Billy, Buddy etc). Perhaps we will never again see the near "supernatural" calls that we have seen on the old Accu-Stats tapes, but even a notch below that would be amazing compared to this.
What to do:
Next year I hope Matchroom (if they insist on keeping the same people on) match each up with a current (or at least fairly recent) top player, that can help them with the calls etc. There are tons of people to pick from: John Schmidt, Johnny Archer, Buddy Hall (old I know, but may still be available) , Pat Holtz. Alex Lely is a candidate if they don't insist on native english speakers. A super obvious choice would be Steve Davis. Great speaker, great player, interesting commentator. What about one of the top Germans? There are just too many to even mention.
