Sticky Wicket - Pencil Moustached Barkeeps & The Game of Cricket

The other day I was taking a stroll through Van Cortlandt Park in the beautiful borough of The Bronx and happened upon a group of men playing cricket. Now, as your typically ignorant American, this is one game that I have never been able to understand. Granted, I've devoted all of about a quarter hour to it in the course of my young life, but I know that I am not alone in my intellectual darkness.

At any rate, I was reminded of this decidedly non-pogonological event by a reference to a certain pencil-moustached bartender within the digitally rendered newsprint of The Guardian. (How I got there, I know not, but back to the action...) Apparently cricket is a sport that warrants live blogging in some quarters, and it was within this context that I stumbled upon the following bit of journalistic elegance:

54th over: England 204-4 (Bell 45, Morgan 29) Shakib has gone around the wicket to Morgan. I can never get comfortable seeing a left-arm spinner bowl around the wicket to left-handers; it's like wearing odd socks, or something. Anyway Morgan drives a single to bring up a serene fifty partnership. "My least favourite bar-type," says Dan Smith, "is the Pencil Moustached Hoxton Barman Who Is Too Cool (to serve me, whether or not I fold my twenty and however skinny my jeans)." Punch him in the face, it'll be cathartic. (Also, for those fortunate enough not to live in London, Hoxton is a soul-crushing dump in the east where those who were bullied at school but later found validation through a combination of perceived intelligence and ostentatious fashion choices gravitate. Yes, yes I do go there most weekends.)

And while I don't know quite what to make of that in its entirety, I did enjoy the hipster reference(s). And truth be told, I've never been completely comfortable with "left-arm[ed] spinners" coming up against other lefties and "bowl[ing] around the wicket" either.

My ignorance knows no bounds.

-The Pogonologist