Finch’s dangerously familiar Australia host an England T20 side in transition

There’s a pleasant sense of relief this week, as we head into an Australia-England cricket contest without an accompanying circus of hype.

Nobody is crowing about a limited-overs series constituting the Twenty20 Ashes, as the marketing departments might once have attempted. Instead the three matches between Sunday and Friday will be rightly seen as warm-ups for the T20 World Cup, even if they’re not part of the official warm-up program that will see Australia play once against India, and England once against Pakistan, before the tournament proper.

This should be a series of relative restraint, with sides looking to find a groove against quality opposition and answer a couple of final selection questions. That fits with the feeling that even the tournament proper is not exactly stirring swells of anticipation. The previous T20 trophy was won less than 11 months ago. The 2024 edition in the Caribbean and United States will be the third in less than three years. The schedule trivialises the concept of a World Cup. These are exhibition tournaments for a funding sugar-hit, not meaningful paths to defining the team of an era. The 50-over format may be declining bilaterally, but the ODI World Cup retains its cachet, while not coincidentally retaining its quadrennial structure alongside its football equivalent and the Olympic Games.

So it is. People will still watch what they don’t retain, and as the modern seer Taylor Swift has observed, the players will continue to play. With their short careers and the vagaries of the format, most cricketers don’t mind a couple of extra attempts at winning a prize to pad out their commentary CVs. Australia’s win in the 2021 edition, on pay television from the Arabian Gulf in the middle of the