Jonathan Liew, Wisden Cricket Monthly columnist, says cricket hasn’t been cool for as long as most of us have been alive, and that’s not changing anytime soon, however hard we try.
This article was first published in issue 18 of Wisden Cricket Monthly. Subscribe here
“Cool is a weird thing,” the comedian Demetri Martin once observed. “A guy in a leather jacket: cool. A guy in a leather vest: not cool. Maybe coolness is all about… leather sleeves.”
It’s a helpful reminder of the essentially nebulous nature of cultural currency, a notion poorly defined and yet instinctively – almost universally – understood. Like dignity, good dancing or the exact point at which a slice of pizza needs to be supported to prevent the cheese sliding off the pointy end, coolness is simply one of those things you recognise on sight: innate, and thus cussedly difficult to manufacture.
This is, in other words, a formidably high bar, one that cricket – with the best will in the world – is some way from clearing. With maybe a short and thrilling interlude in 2007 – lasting exactly the length of the camera shot of Kirsten Dunst and Razorlight’s Johnny Borrell at the Lord’s Test – cricket hasn’t been cool for as long as most of us have been alive.
And actually, maybe that’s fine. Perhaps it’s time we admitted that a game defined by atmospheric pressure, statistical minutiae and shiny trousers was never going to be part of the cultural zeitgeist.
Perhaps it’s time to admit that this is what drew so many of us to the game in the first place: the nerds, the misfits, the quiet obsessives. Perhaps it’s time cricket’s decision-makers slipped off their leather sleeves and joined us in the corner. We’ve been chatting about the heavy roller for 25 minutes. You’ve missed nothing.
