Cricket will rue dawn of Twenty20

It's fair to say that Australia has not embraced Twenty20 cricket to the same extent as other nations. Their defeat in the semi-final against India was the first time they had failed to reach the final of a major world tournament since 2004, and while India and Pakistan slug it out in Johannesburg, the Aussies are pondering the future of their beloved game. For Gideon Haigh, among others, the future is not entirely bright.

So the administrators have a hit on their hands, a hit that will reverberate. We have already seen the best-case scenario: a successful tournament still tinged with novelty.

Through time, however, it is likely that the main beneficiaries will be commercial intermediaries.

Cricket will make a great deal of money in the short term, money it has no obvious need for and will mostly waste, and it will be left a coarser, crueller, crasser game as a result. Now that the Twenty20 world championship is over, another proverb comes to mind: be careful what you wish for.