The Spin | India’s dominance looms over faster and more furious T20 World Cup
In the immortal words of Brenda from Bristol, not another one.Between 17 October 2021, the start of the tournament in the United Arab Emirates, and 8 March 2026, the date of this year’s final, four T20 World Cups will have been squeezed into four years, four months and 19 days.If they come along more regularly even than British general elections – to which Brenda produced her timeless reaction in 2017 – they at least have more interesting results: the past five have had five different winners and the past three six different finalists.What’s more, though not much time has passed since the last one ended with India beating South Africa in Barbados, it seems to have been long enough for the game to shift into a fresh and exhilarating new gear.It is too soon to be drawing conclusions about the state of the game in 2026, but in 21 T20 internationals in the first month of this year 6,960 runs were scored at 9.
13 an over – a massively higher scoring rate than any previous year.England scored at 9.91 an over in 2025, their best figure, and of the Test-playing nations only Bangladesh, who are not at the tournament, Australia and West Indies did not either break their run-scoring record in 2025 or set themselves on course to do so this year.The record for batting strike rates in the Indian Premier League was broken in 2023, again in 2024 and again in 2025.The figure for this year’s Big Bash was down slightly on last year’s record, but still above every other year.
The 2025 tournaments sit second in the rankings for Pakistan’s PSL and the Caribbean Premier League in the West Indies, and first in Bangladesh’s BPL and England’s Blast,Not counting 2005 and 2006, when hardly any were played, in the first six years of T20 internationals, three teams successfully chased more than 200 to win games,It has happened twice this year and in matches between Test-playing nations three times in 2025 (while a few rungs down the ladder Gibraltar and Bulgaria managed to do it three times in four days in Sofia in August),Six of the seven highest T20 international totals have been scored since the last World Cup, with England’s epic 304 for two against South Africa at Old Trafford in September only good enough for third on the list,Before June 2025, there was only one series when a scoring rate above 11 an over was sustained throughout; in the past eight months there have been four, all but one between teams big enough to be at this World Cup.
In short, the past 13 months have produced a sustained acceleration in scoring speed, in domestic and international fixtures.So there is every reason to expect the action coming over the next five weeks to be faster, more furious, more epically senseless than ever.The only problem with the format, so long as you like your sport epically senseless, is that one team has simply become too good at it.No side have defended the T20 World Cup nor won it at home.But India have every possible advantage: they will play every game at home, after Pakistan were ordered by their government not to play the fixture that would have forced them to travel to Sri Lanka on 15 February, and they are unfathomably good.
This format is wildly unpredictable, with games prone to being decided in a couple of key moments, and often by little more than chance, but India have such an abundance of quality they have almost taken luck out of it,Since the last World Cup final they have played 41 T20s and lost six, winning 31,At home they have won 14 out of 17,When they played the June 2024 final Abhishek Sharma was yet to make his international debut, and as they go into this tournament he is the world No 1 batter, the hottest property in the game,In January, despite being dismissed for a duck in two of his five innings, Sharma scored 182 runs and averaged 45.
5.He faced 73 balls.Against New Zealand in Guwahati he scored a 14-ball half-century.His teammate Shivam Dube scored a 15-ball half-century against the same opponents three days later, which means five of the six fastest T20 half-centuries in India’s history have been scored in the past year, three of them in the past two months.To take that global, of the 246 T20 international half-centuries to have been scored off 23 balls or fewer, 57 – very nearly a quarter – have come since the start of 2025.
After India and a giant chasm of complete emptiness where a genuine rival might be, the next most impressive major nation since the start of last year – a feat all the more remarkable because it has somehow been achieved really quite unimpressively – is England,After wrapping up a series win in Sri Lanka with victory in the second match in Kandy they had won 10 of their past 17 games while scoring at 9,86 an over, faster even than India’s 9,73,Though Brendon McCullum has led them through a miserable winter, marked by players being freed to indulge in disappointing decision-making on and off the pitch, the 2022 champions have the benefit of knowing they cannot face India or Australia until the semi-finals at the earliest.
But Australia are the bookmakers’ second favourites, which doesn’t reflect the injury crisis that has ruled out Pat Cummins and forced Josh Hazlewood to remain in Sydney at the start the tournament, but does reflect their world ranking and the fact that they are Australia and this is a World Cup,Bangladesh’s absence, after announcing a few weeks from the start of the tournament they would refuse to play in India – the one Bangladeshi team that was willing to come, its journalists, was shamefully refused accreditation en masse – and the apparent loss of Pakistan’s encounter with India, the sport’s most high-profile and lucrative game, have tarnished in advance the reputation this tournament is about to make,In this sport, chaos and calamity are never far from the surface, but in this format, and at this moment, the next few weeks promise to be particularly wild,This is an extract from the Guardian’s weekly cricket email, The Spin,To subscribe, just visit this page and follow the instructions
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