LOOKING BACK, LOOKING FORWARD

GH with some thoughts on the T20 World Cup on the eve of the final

Sic transit gloria mundi, and the T20 World Cup also. Shorter formats make for swifter fortunes.  You can fit fifty-five games involving twenty participants into twenty-eight days versus the ODI World Cup’s forty-eight matches involving ten participants in forty-four days, and still feel like there’s change left over.

Kudos, in fact.  The International Cricket Council, it is frequently said, with a tone of disapproval, is less a global governing body or sporting parliament than an events management company - I have said it myself.  But what it does, it does well.  

Managing the infrastructural and jurisdictional issues of a tournament spread seven countries was a formidable challenge. The ICC seem to have pulled it off without a hitch - no small things given the ticketing and scheduling fiascos of India last year.  So, no, the ICC isn’t everything but it is something, and the effectiveness with which it discharges its remnant task  is a reminder of its potential.

While it was fast off the field, full of quick changes and rapid progresses, this Cup will be remembered for its relatively sedate pace, certainly by T20’s headlong standards.  During this year’s Indian Premier League, batting seemed to have hit escape velocity.  Perhaps the only way to go was down.  

In any event, the T20 World Cup ticked over at barely half the rate, measured by runs per over and concentration of sixes, on wildly different pitches, fast and bouncy in the US, where quick bowlers ruled the roost, and slow and low in the Caribbean, where spinners were seen to advantage.

As the advent of the impact player in the IPL was a propellant, so its absence was probably a retardant.  It did look, at least at the outset, that batters’ heads were still spinning from their months in India, that they could make no concessions to survival.

But maybe there was another factor at play - that while ICC events are more abundant than of yore, they remain rarer than domestic tournaments.  International cricket, I think, still matters in ways that franchise cricket does not quite, at least as yet - even if one of the ways it matters is as a cricket talent mart.  What money might now chase the Afghanistan pair Fazal Farooqi and Ramanullah Gurbaz, the cup’s improbable highest wicket taker and run scorer?

The T20 World Cup is the tenser for its democratic temper, its genuine ‘any given Sunday’ quality.  Since Sri Lanka’s breakthrough victory in the ODI World Cup in 1996, only the big three have won it; this final of the T20 World Cup could result in the sixth winner in nine instalments.  

Twenty teams seemed just about the right size field, while all global events benefit by an early upset - provided here by the US beating Pakistan and Afghanistan crushing New Zealand.  Also, say it soft, but any tournament where Australia is not there at the end just offers a few more possibilities.

As T20 has shed its novelty value, too, the T20 World Cup has built a surprisingly prestigious, and also ecumenical history.  Its hall of heroes, because a rapid 40 or a timely three-for can turn a match, is not confined to the great; it incorporates the good also.  Yuvraj Singh and Jogimber Sharma, Chris Gayle and Dwayne Bravo, Aaron Jones and Saurabh Natravalkar; Zimbabwe beating Australia, the Netherlands beating England, and Kohli beating Australia and Pakistan; Mike Hussey v Saeed Ajmal and Ben Stokes v Carlos Brathwaite.  T20Is may come and go but, when the world gathers, cricket’s most perishable format achieves a curious indelibility - what starts as graffiti ends as a tattoo.

Because T20 is more or less constantly mutating, old tricks are crammed up against new.  What was the most delectable skill on display in this cup?  Not perhaps the ramp or the reverse, the helicopter or the gyroscope or whatever, but the googly - cricket’s original innovation, 120 years young, originated by BJT Bosanquet, and still baffling ‘em.  This cup had multiple brilliant interpreters - Rashid Khan, Adil Rashid, Kuldeep Yadav, Adam Zampa and Tabraiz Shamsi. Batters setting up to access short boundaries and/or take advantage of wind direction were ill-suited to making sudden shifts of weight and adjustments of batswing.

Everyone kept asking: was cricket’s American experiment a success?  It was a success even getting it there.  A tournament in the US was first mooted fifteen years ago, and had become a case study in global cricket’s slow hastening - cricket can now say that, at the very least, it has been ticked on the to-do list.  

But what mattered every bit as much as providing diaspora populations in the US with a bounty of batting and bowling was dropping a relief package of global cricket in the Caribbean, where the Caribbean Premier League has become a sweet and sticky substitute for the traditional West Indian diet.  

It was a relief that the weather, fickle in the Caribbean at this time of year, was not the influence it sometimes threatened to be.  It was disappointing to see Rovman Powell’s team fail to progress to the semi-finals, for at intervals they played explosive cricket - Pooran’s 98 off 53 against Afghanistan may have been the outstanding innings of the tournament.  At the same time, Andre Nortje’s run out of Andre Russell may the key fielding intervention and Jason Holder’s the key absence.  At any rate, West Indies reminded us what was missing from the last ODI World Cup when the trophy’s inaugural winner failed to qualify.

We won’t have a winner from Bridgetown until Monday morning Australian time, but either India’s galacticos or South Africa’s scrappers would be worthy.  By the time they get round to defending the trophy in 2026, cricket will be different again but hopefully as much fun.