A prayer for cricket to rise above the politics

The men's T20 World Cup is cricket's biggest party. It is the pinnacle event that showcases the broadest array of teams - from Europe, the Antipodes, the Middle East, Africa, the Americas. The guest list had been finalised. The caterers were locked in. The band was booked.

But oh. In the neighbourhood hosting the party, dysfunction is spilling over. Pakistan had refused to play in India, in return for India having refused to play in Pakistan last year. Bangladesh have since exited the tournament for different reasons. Now, most recently, Pakistan have announced they will not play their group match against India even in Colombo. These are tornadoes that have been whipped up in the political world and then sent in cricket's direction. What this means for the tournament is that as the guests are arriving, there is obvious discomfort. To cut this tension, you'd need a chainsaw.

Perhaps, when the cricket actually starts, we will shift our focus to the good things. The things that pull us in, rather than push us away. The degrees of swing seamers are generating in the Sri Lankan humidity. The true bounce on Indian tracks given to run-making. The wearing squares that will bring spinners into the game as the tournament builds.

There is a version of how the next few weeks plays out that is a cricket lover's fantasy. Three matches a day in the group stage (a daylong T20 bingefest for the streaming age)? Yes please. Upwards of 200 players on show every week in the format that already showcases the greatest spread of cricketing skills? Where do we sign up? Eight venues across two countries in which cricket is the most beloved sport by a distance? Can't wait.

If we're lucky, this is the kind of tournament we could tumble wholesale into. The era of the posters-on-the-bedroom wall might be on its way out, but cricket fans primarily decorate the internet now, filling threads with analysis, social media posts with stories from matches, producing short-form video gags with the hope of going viral, plus that enduring Millennial and Gen Z obsession: memes. Try watch this take on Glenn Maxwell's 201* v Afghanistan from the 2023 ODI World Cup, for instance, and try not to chuckle. There is a universe where in the next few weeks, cricket revels in these uncomplicated joys, because at its very best, it speaks the common language of humanity.

On the field, India are leading pretty much anyone's favourites list. It is easy to see why: their squad for this tournament may perhaps be the most forbidding ever put together, with sublime talents in every department, honed for years in the biggest league going. They have won almost five times as many matches as they have lost since the start of 2025.

Pakistan have built up quite the head of steam too, having just come off a 3-0 trouncing of Australia at home. Australia themselves can never be counted out of course - there is still no country with a greater claim to World Champion DNA. Will England cast off memories of a sorry tour of Australia and threaten in white-ball cricket again, partially redeeming the Bazball project? Can New Zealand make their usual charge into the business end?

And how much will it rain, particularly in Sri Lanka, which has just endured its worst monsoon in decades? February tends to be a cooler month in the region, the winds coming off the Himalayas, all the way along the edge of the Bay of Bengal. Even the name of the bay brings to mind Bangladesh, who on purely cricketing terms should have been playing in this World Cup, no shred of doubt. However the next few weeks go, the World Cup will have lost a little meaning for their absence. And hundreds of millions of cricket fans in that country have been spurned because of the politics in the region and at the ICC.

Cricket needs to rediscover something of its best right now. We need this World Cup to burst with the kinds of narratives we have loved - the Gangnam dance from 2012, the pinpoint Lankan yorkers from the 2014 final, Carlos Brathwaite clubbing four epic successive sixes, Suryakumar Yadav's catch on the boundary, James Neesham blasting his team into a World Cup final in 2021 having missed out on selection for a home ODI World Cup in 2015.

Perhaps it is naive to expect cricket to suddenly do all this, but what choice have the game's decision-makers left us? What more can we do than lean into this naivety? There is another version of how this World Cup goes, in which geopolitical faults widen and intensify, as they did during the appalling conclusion to last year's Asia Cup.

That it will be better this time is not so much a hope, but a prayer. A plea. Because after the party ends, and the lights switch off, our love for cricket should stay undimmed. We cannot have our sport becoming a corrosive influence on our societies in South Asia. Because at the end of all of this, when the confetti has been cleared up, and the guests have headed home, billions of us still need to live here.