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It’s not that, historically, sporting events have struggled to excite me. I get excited about the Commonwealth Games. I get excited about the World Rugby Sevens.
There was even a time when I got excited about Country versus City Origin games, and developed a fierce loyalty to the concept of ‘City’ that stays with me today. I definitely possess the sporting excitement gene.
And yet, somehow, the World Twenty20 hasn’t quite excited me.
This might be because Australia hasn’t started in it yet: as a rather pathetically one-eyed Australian supporter in all sports (except for international rules, which is a non-sport, and a fairly stupid non-sport at that, and which brings out in me nothing but an urgent need to see the plucky Irishmen give the cocky AFL mob a belting) I do tend to get a lot more excited when the prospect of Australian triumph is imminent.
So with any major tournament, it never quite feels ‘on’ until the nation in which I was fortunate or unfortunate enough to be born gets involved.
This has been exacerbated in the World T20 by the weird format where all the minor nations had a go at each other before the big boys got started. Which was fun, but strange, especially when the big boys were playing warm-ups against each other at the same time and it all got kind of confusing as to which games were real games and which games weren’t – and that’s always a problem with Twenty20 cricket anyway.
And there, I fear, lies the well-known rub. The fact is, I strongly suspect I’m struggling to get excited about the World Twenty20 because it is a tournament to determine world supremacy in a game which wasn’t invented until after I was born, and that makes it all seem slightly trite.
How on earth can a sport claim genuine gravitas and importance when nobody even had the idea to play it until I was in my 20s? And if that seems a bit solipsistic of me, maybe you don’t understand just how intoxicating the power trip of writing humorous sports columns is.
Test cricket I get excited about. Even when it’s not particularly exciting Test cricket. In the summer just gone, I knew the series against the West Indies would be a dreadful and slightly depressing mismatch, but gee it got the blood pumping to know it was on.
Because no matter what the standard of play, no matter what the gulf between the abilities of one side or the other, when I look at a Test match, I see the continuation of a tradition the best part of 150 years old. I see passionate, dedicated sportsmen lining up in the ranks of history.
And one-day cricket I can get excited about. There was a one-day World Cup before I was born – the legend had already begun by the time I came into the world, and before I started actually paying attention to the game, Australia had already won one. There was already a one-day folklore, a one-day tradition.
It’s no Test cricket, and there’s always plenty of pointless, disposable one-dayers being played around the world: but when two top-flight teams clash in a series, and especially when the world gathers for that venerable four-decades-old tournament, it remains a thrill. Even when the one-day format itself feels a trifle weary.
Now, Twenty20 cricket is currently forging its traditions, and the fact that it has more music playing over the PA, more irritating on-field interviews, and more bizarrely counterproductive reverse pulls from the batsmen, doesn’t mean those traditions won’t grow and blossom in time.
In fact they certainly will: T20 has hurtled towards seriousness from its frivolous beginnings at an alarming pace, and all we need to do is ban every broadcaster from fitting any player with an earpiece to make it a fully-fledged Deadly Serious Affair, if it’s not one already, which it probably is to loads of people who aren’t me.
It’s not a matter of enjoyment. I enjoy T20 enormously. It is massively entertaining, and the nature of the truncated format means a large percentage of playing time is generally spent with the game in the balance, with a good proportion of games going down to the wire.
Also the skills on display are genuinely spectacular – it’s not actually all that easy to hit a six, especially when your hands are back to front. And it’s damnably hard to land a yorker exactly where you want it when the awful consequences of a minor miscalculation are all too apparent. Not to mention the now regular sight of the leap-back-catch-the-ball-fall-over-the-rope-throw-the-ball-in-run-back-over-the-rope-and-catch-it-again manoeuvre. It’s incredibly impressive.
And I do want Australia to win. I do. I will be less happy if Australia doesn’t win the World Twenty20 than I will be if they do. It’s just that if they don’t, I feel like my reaction will be closer to the ‘oh well’ end of the spectrum than the ‘punch a wall’ end that tends to come into play, for example, during Ashes series.
I just feel like the World Twenty20 is… fun. And the sporting events that get me the most excited aren’t fun. The Ashes. State of Origin. The Bledisloe Cup. Grand finals of various stripes. They’re not fun. They’re torture.
It’s utter agony to sit through them because I know just how miserable I’ll be if they don’t end the right way. The World Twenty20, up to now, has been a great spectacle to watch, with little to no fear of all-encompassing melancholy setting in at its conclusion.
However, as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar put it, the fault, dear Cassius, lies not in our international cricket formats, but in ourselves. If the World Twenty20 isn’t exciting me, it seems likely that the blame is on me.
And I can work on that. I’m sure I can. With hard work, honest commitment, and constant repetition of the mantra, “I don’t like cricket… I love it!” I can get excited about this feisty young player on the world sporting stage.
There’s no reason why I shouldn’t. By the end of this year’s tournament, I will be as invested and irrationally obsessed with it as anyone on God’s green earth.
May the ghost of Gilbert Jessop strike me down if I am not.