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All descriptives in cricket comm come from the standards held by the white man. The cricketing version of EU beauty standards. It has created a mandate where your gentle drives & flicks are the peak of cricketing aesthetics. The truth is there is no peak for sth as subjective.
I once remember Gayle batting with a white cricketer(don't recall him) who played a good looking drive. The comm called it "pleasant". 2 balls later, Gayle plays the traditional cover drive beautifully. The comm says, "wow, finally a half decent cricketing shot from the big man".
You can't ever objectively say which batsman is more beautiful to watch. You can obviously tell who you find more attractive but to extrapolate that as the general norm is ridiculous. But the internalised racial stereotyping involved in this just makes it 10x worse.
Today, you don't see the white commentators stereotype Asian cricketers like everyone does with the Carribbean/Black players. But there was a time they hated seeing short and feeble men from India and Sri Lanka caress the ball through the cover like even their best ones couldn't.
Lara once told how he felt awkward when a former England player told him that his batting was nothing like his countrymen. From the outside, that looks like a compliment. But it also has an underlying tone that the black men from the Islands aren't capable of playing elegantly.
It's not just a racial issue. You also see it from a cricketing context. There are so many who like Steve Smith's style of batting, myself included. Probably, the majority doesn't but it doesn't mean anything.
We shouldn't we have a rule book to judge which style of batting is more beautiful. But we do have one and that's by and large derived from the colonial history this sport has, like many others.
