India has become the first team to win the T20 World Cup without losing a single game during the tournament, giving the country its second T20 World Cup and its first major ICC trophy since the 2013 Champions Trophy. Back then, most of the current squad had yet to even join the national side. Since the 2013 Champions Trophy triumph, the story of India’s national side has been reaching and losing major finals – five of them in all, if one counts the World Test Championship. As such, this victory was much needed for team India to change the narrative about their performance in major finals and for senior players like Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma to add some much-needed silverware to their otherwise phenomenal legacies. Even many fans of India’s bitter rivals Pakistan would not begrudge these two the victory that they have just attained. For Kohli, this game was his T20 swansong. His 76 runs of 59 bulls as the rest of the top order collapsed around him helped India reach a very respectable 176 runs. They have been the model of consistency, composure, experience and clutch performance that is lacking on this side of the border.
When someone sticks around in Pakistani cricket for as long as Kohli and Sharma did in India, it is usually due to poor selection and a stubborn unwillingness to accept that one is past their prime. Then there are the younger talents like Player of the Tournament Jasprit Bumrah, whose two wickets for 18 runs helped keep South Africa under the 177-run target and seal the victory. His dismissal of South Africa’s Marco Jansen was particularly important, coming when South Africa needed just 21 runs to win the game. How many could-have-been Bumrahs have Pakistan fans seen come in and out of their team over the years, looking like they can conquer the world one moment and then out of the squad the next? The PCB could do worse than having a look at how the BCCI develops young talent.
South Africa, the runners-up in this tournament also have a reputation for failing to see through major tournaments. Their malady is somewhat different from the one the Indian team just cured, with this being only their second major final, with the first during the 1998 Champions Trophy also ending in a loss. If one makes a list of the top ten cricketers in each position, there would be two to three South Africans in each list. And this is with the team enduring around two decades of boycott due to apartheid, making their record in major tournaments quite bizarre. Sadly for South Africa, the finals’ ghosts will continue to haunt them until the next major tournament gives them a chance of vanquishing them once and for all. However, this should not take away from their performance throughout this tournament which has mostly been quite good. And there were other bright spots too. Afghanistan, relatively new to the global cricket scene, went all the way to the semi-finals before losing to India. Zooming out and looking at the cricketing landscape as a whole, one cannot shake the feeling that tournaments like this do not carry quite the weight they once did. Indian cricket has dominated the sport for over a decade now it has the same number of major trophies in the last 10 years as Pakistan. Their dominance has more to do with the IPL than what its side has been doing on the international stage. This does not mean that international cricket does not matter. The Indian cricket team is still one of the most valuable brands in sports and that will not change for some time. However, it is slowly becoming clear that much of the new energy and impetus in cricket now comes from the private sector, for better or for worse.