Of Laughter and Forgetting

GH wonders how much the T20WC matters

For someone who spends a lot of time in proximity of international cricket, I have comparatively few souvenirs. One exception is this keyring, a memento of the T20 World Cup six years ago - aka the 2020 Twenty20. You remember it, don’t you? There was that thing. Then that other thing happened. Somebody hit some sixes. Somebodies made some money. And, errr, that’s it.

Except that, the astute among you will already have noticed, none of this happened. That particular tournament coincided with the abolition of all pleasure in the name of containing COVID contagion. The 2020 T20 World Cup was finally held two years later, after the 2021 T20 World Cup: my souvenir came courtesy of Nick Hockley, then CEO at Cricket Australia, whom I asked one day if he had any merch from the cancelled event. A package turned up a few days later, with a backpack that unfortunately lasted not much longer than a T20 match. But the keyring endures, almost as resilient as the ghost sign that continues spruiking the 2015 World Cup on Albert Road.

All of which says something about the T20 World Cup. This is the trophy’s tenth instalment, but the fourth in four and a half years, and there will be two more before the decade ends, in addition to the six-team global T20 summit at the Olympics. It bequeathed its most serious legacy in its first staging, when India narrowly bested Pakistan twice - Indians so fell under T20’s spell that the Indian Premier League became possible. Today it blends increasingly into the ceaseless profusion of T20 events round the world. The previous instalment, following those years of COVID fog, was confusingly diffused between the Caribbean and the United States; the most consequential fixture of this instalment will be held at a neutral venue. From here, even on the brink of Australia’s opening game tonight, it all feels rather far away, sequestered behind a paywall between the Ashes and the Indian Premier League, between the tennis and the football.