In Praise of the Leave: Test Cricket and the Age of the Loudest Shouts

Consumer internet rewards the spectacular, we forget how games — and societies — are truly won: through patience, pressure, and the quiet courage to do keep doing the right thing.

Algorithms prize velocity and outrage; it’s who can shout the loudest - see the New Statesman Article: How Britain’s political conversation turned toxic. The loudest shouts most extreme views are the ones that get proliferated on the Internet. Just as the biggest hits and most fantastic wickets are what goes on the ECB highlights page. Out of context quotes followed by swathes of outrage fill social media. The context of a single in an innings is missed in the 3 minute boundary highlights.

The importance of a defensive shot or pause in the grand scheme of the game is missed. Just as the flashpoints in history outweigh the mechanisms that caused them (frog, boiling water etc.). This rewriting of history into the most bombastic moments are misleading. They will also become meaningless as we realise they have no bearing on how to win games or change things.

I’m not sure if the social media age has shorted out attention span into 1 minute snippets or economics of news readership has changed the industry as to only output thin, sensationalist headlines. Result is the sam, we’ve lost the the understanding of the game from our lives and from our cricket

Not only has the product changed, our tolerance has changed. A recent Kanye West appearance on Jimmy Kimmel led to a particularly jarring twitter furor.

When asked for his opinion on Trump, in th background of other comments he’d made. He took long pensive silence to think about it, this seems admirable in a world of knee jerk reactions.

But the host interrupted his thinking time, there was no room for thinking. For this question was squeezed between the advertisements generating revenue for the studio. And the leave outside off stump won’t make the highlight package.