Shut up whiners, India had to overcome lots of burdens to win the Champions Trophy

And so they did it, triumphing against the odds. Plucky India, with their population of 1.4 billion. With their ICC revenue share of US$230 million. With their team of IPL Galacticos (but no Jasprit Bumrah, of course - another hurdle to overcome). They defeated New Zealand, Goliaths of overachievement, in the Champions Trophy final and the whole cricket world rejoiced.

Or at least the biggest contributors to cricket's economy rejoiced, which pretty much amounts to the same thing. Seriously, who do you think is paying for all this stuff?

We had to cheer the little guy on right to the last ball of the penultimate over, so gamely did they attempt to make a game of it. Almost as if to underline the message "Look, folks, no undue advantage here." Rohit Sharma even stretched mathematical probability to its outermost limit by wilfully losing the toss for the 12,000th time in a row - just to emphasise how up against it his side were.

Gautam Gambhir had already put the "perpetual cribbers" in their place after the semi-final, when responding to such undignified questioning as "How brilliant is your brilliant India team, sir?" And Rohit swatted away the idea that spending the entire tournament in Dubai, while everyone else shuttled around Pakistan and back-and-forth to the UAE, was in any way beneficial.

"It's not our home either," he said. "We don't play so many matches here, it's new for us as well." He might have added that choosing dinner from the same five-star menu becomes really hard after the sixth night in a row, let alone three weeks, and that many of his team-mates had struggled to pack enough swimming trunks to cover the duration of their stay. Who was to know that the Dubai pitch would support bowling 38 overs of spin in the final? Certainly not India.

Okay, so Mohammed Shami said something about it being a "plus point that all our matches have been played at the same venue" - but he is merely a 12-year veteran of international cricket, and the second-highest wicket-taker in the tournament, so what does his opinion count for?

Sure, there might have been a few more fans wearing blue shirts than black caps in the stadium, but this was a classic battle for sporting supremacy. It's a wonder, really, that the players didn't go to the logical end point of their refusal to countenance any sort of bias towards India and shove ICC chair Jay Shah off the stage following the trophy presentation, a la Australia and Sharad Pawar all those years ago. Now that would have sent a message.

Anyway, talking of tournaments where there's only one winner… shut your traps, haters, the IPL is about to start.

For Pakistan, what was meant to be a crowning moment - hosting an ICC tournament for the first time since 1996 - became something more like a public flogging. To be fair to the PCB (a sentence we don't write often), not all of their pain was self-inflicted. From Pakistan's name being scrubbed off the TV broadcast logo, to India's anthem being played at the Gaddafi, to losing out on the right to stage the final - as India's gravitational pull dragged the tournament away to the UAE - to having no representative on stage for the trophy presentation, the hosts were slowly ghosted. Sure, there was some self-sabotage, like always - Pakistan winning zero games didn't help. But remember, just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.

England's Champions Trophy, meanwhile, stank out the room in a way that has barely been conceivable since they started playing white-ball cricket in 2015 (Is this right? - Ed). The promotion of Brendon McCullum to all-formats supremo looked to be on rocky ground after the team lost ten out of 11 games on tour in India and Pakistan… but hold on just a minute. England, remember, are on a mission from Baz to save Test cricket. And if that means tanking in the limited-overs stuff to the extent that it becomes unwatchable, then job done. Yep, that's right, everybody, the Bazballers have done it again with their 4D chess. No need to thank them (although a namecheck wouldn't go amiss). The future of Tests is safe in their hands.