Thursday turned out to be a bit of a hair of the dog moment for Indian cricket. Just four days after Australia defeated India in a 50-over World Cup final, the two teams played again in a T20 International in Visakhapatnam.
If the defeat on Sunday left the Indian team a bit woozy, embarrassed and perhaps feeling chastised, they got over it quickly. India won by two wickets on Thursday, having overcome any hangover from the previous defeat by quickly dousing themselves in a new game. Albeit, to call it the same Indian team would be erroneous, considering Suryakumar Yadav was the only player to participate on field on both Sunday (November 19, 2023) and Thursday (November 23), as opposed to the Australian team that had several players in common to the two matches.
Sport teaches athletes to get over victories and defeats quickly. They have to, because to ponder over what’s already done is a waste of time and distracts from the job at hand—the next match, competition, challenge. Yadav had struggled in the Ahmedabad final, swishing, swinging and missing the ball multiple times during the course of a laborious 28-ball 18 before he was dismissed to everyone’s relief.
But time is a great healer, as is T20. There is less of a need in the shorter format of the game to build an inning. There is less judgement for inelegant shots, for swings and misses. It’s a format that works for SKY, whose average from 37 ODIs is 25.76 and from 54 T20Is is 46.85. He also has three T20I hundreds and none from ODIs, 16 scores of over 50 in T20Is versus four in ODIs, marking out clearly which format he is more suited for.
In Thursday’s match, Yadav was more at ease, despite the added hassle of being the team captain. His 42-ball 80 took India to 194-5 by the 18th over chasing 209 for a win. Then three wickets fell in the next over, including two run-outs, before Rinku Singh finished the match off.
Just a day before that, Yadav’s press conference had two reporters in attendance, from a couple of hundred a few days earlier for the World Cup final. Cricket fatigue hit everyone—from the Indian players to the media covering it. Since many Indian players skipped the match, so too did reporters.
But fatigue is not something to affect the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and the Australian Cricket Board (ACB), who thought it would be a good idea to follow up the World Cup with a bilateral series. Of course, neither board knew beforehand that their team would make it to the final. If both Australia and India had been knocked out earlier from the World Cup, they would have had a couple of weeks off before playing the bilateral series, in which case it would, maybe, not have been an overkill.
The new series also reinforces a belief that’s gained some credence after Ahmedabad—that India is good in league games but not so much against Australia in the finals of any tournament. The five-match T20I series will take the Australians across the country, from Thiruvananthapuram, to Guwahati, Raipur and Bengaluru over 11 days. Chances of an Indian series win are high, considering there is no “final” to this. Besides, there could be a little vengeance for the World Cup loss—with a T20I series win and wearing the Aussies out by making them travel crosscountry.
Too much cricket might be a common grouse these days, but as long as media rights and sponsors support it, it continues to be a financial plus for the board. The 2023 World Cup created a record for attendance, with a total of 1,250,307 fans in attendance during the six-week tournament, according to the International Cricket Council (ICC). The previous figure was of 1,016,420 spectators for the 2015 event in Australia and New Zealand. The numbers dispel any notions of ODIs’ declining popularity—at least in this country—and that the stadiums were not filled up during initial matches of the World Cup.
Digital broadcaster Disney + Hotstar had a record 5.9 crore peak concurrent viewers for finals, up from 3.5 crore for the India-Pakistan match and 5.3 crore peak concurrency during the India-New Zealand semifinals. Broadcaster Disney Star quoted BARC data to say that the final between India and Australia drew a record 30 crore viewers, making it the most-watched cricket match on television to date. The broadcaster added that the tournament had viewership crossing half a billion for the first time with 51.8 crore people tuning in to watch the matches on linear TV, according to media reports. Total consumption was 422 billion minutes, making it the biggest World Cup ever.
Maybe there is no such thing as too much cricket in India. Numbers tell a more accurate story than laments on social media. Maybe a breather between the World Cup and the T20I series would have helped fans; or then there might be some who prefer to have something to watch all the time.
South Africa’s Quinton de Kock has decided to quit ODIs. England’s Ben Stokes has opted out of the 2024 Indian Premier League (IPL) to manage his workload. These are countries—and players—that don’t even play as much cricket as Indians do. India may have lost the World Cup, but the sport in the country continues to gain victories.
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