It’s rare to see a play-by-play announcer suddenly go silent, but that happened for several minutes in the second quarter of the West Virginia-Texas Tech broadcast on ESPN2 Saturday. Play-by-play announcer Anish Shroff’s voice was nowhere to be found for a while, although analyst Ahmad Brooks (seen at left above with Shroff in a 2017 screencap) was still heard normally. Here’s an early clip of this, with a play with no play-by-play followed by Brooks’ analysis:
Here’s another clip from a few minutes later with a similar issue, but this time Brooks seems to realize what’s up and offers a short play-by-play description before throwing to break:
After that break, Shroff was back with an apology, saying “We apologize for the technical difficulties. We had some issues with our booth microphones a little while ago. We hope to have that resolved for you.”
The absence led to some questioning on Twitter if Shroff had left the broadcast, but he responded by saying it was just booth microphone issues:
https://twitter.com/AnishESPN/status/1046093992755105792
https://twitter.com/AnishESPN/status/1046099124834193417
That’s certainly not an everyday occurrence, and that’s an unfortunate one for Shroff and the ESPN booth. But hey, at least he didn’t pull a Mack Brown.
[Ben Koo on Clippit]
