Josh Hazlewood: ‘I hardly watch any cricket. Do I like it? I like playing it’

A smile plays upon the edges of Josh Hazlewood’s mouth. This, to be clear, is not a fleeting reaction to some momentary amusement, but a more or less permanent feature. Over the course of a couple of conversations, one in Canberra and the other a few days later in Brisbane, it is almost always there – the smile of a man who seems to have cracked the T20 code.

Hazlewood’s rise in this format has been very recent and bewilderingly rapid. For most of the 31-year-old’s career he was assumed to be terrible at it, and having made his T20 international debut in 2013 he played nine games for his country over the next eight years.

“I just didn’t play it, to be honest,” he says. Before the first game of Australia’s T20 World Cup defence, against New Zealand on Saturday, the total number of T20s he has played for his country and various franchise teams stands at 89 – fewer than Harry Brook, the 23-year-old who has only recently broken into the England side, and less than half the total of Afghanistan’s Mujeeb Ur Rahman, 10 years his junior.

Everything changed in June 2021, when a number of players including the seamers Pat Cummins, Daniel Sams and Jhye Richardson, tired of life inside biosecure bubbles, chose not to take part in Australia’s white-ball tour of West Indies, and Hazlewood stepped in. At that stage he had played 10 T20 matches in the previous five years. Five months later he had won the game’s two biggest prizes, the IPL and the T20 World Cup, and a year later he was officially named the world’s No 1 T20i bowler.

His ascent is more remarkable because in a world of rapidly changing time signatures, Hazlewood is a metronome, known most of all for repeatedly landing the ball on an ideal line and length.

“I’ve got some