Hat-tricks? Yawn

Hat-tricks: like buses, right? Wait so long for one and then a whole bunch come along all at once. At least that's how it seems right now, having watched* three hat-tricks in four** days at the T20 World Cup.

Except, wrong. Chris Jordan's homecoming hat-trick against the USA was the 26th hat-trick in all T20 cricket since January 2023. That's approximately one and a half hat-tricks per month.

In the same time, there have only been five hat-tricks in List A cricket and only one in an ODI. The last hat-trick in an ODI between two Full Members was in December 2019. The last Test hat-trick was three years ago, in St Lucia. There have been 46 hat-tricks in all Test cricket; there have been 47 in T20s since April 2022 alone.

Is there a point? A tentative one, that hat-tricks are cheaper in T20s, which follows from the format's wickets being cheaper; and also follows from there being more T20s, including more of those that are now classified as internationals (18 of the 26 T20 hat-tricks since January 2023 came in international matches, including those of Mark Pavlovic, who took two in two days for Serbia last year). They feel less momentous and more underwhelming, in the vein of Steven Finn's infamous hat-trick in the 2015 World Cup: three slogs off the last three balls of an innings, which ultimately helped reduce slightly the margin of a thumping.

They are the opposite of Glenn McGrath's hat-trick on a first morning at the WACA, a full house in, and Brian Lara the middle victim - also McGrath's 300th Test wicket. Or Harbhajan Singh's Kolkata hustling of the all-conquering Australians, somehow only the second- or third-most epic act of that Test. Wasim Akram's two in successive Tests inside ten days, the clearest evidence of his enduring ability to create magic within minutes; or Stuart Broad's epic hometown hat-trick against India, schadenfreude claiming the assist on Harbhajan's big inside-edge lbw in the days when the BCCI wouldn't allow DRS in India series; all of these were occasions.

It's not just red-ball snobbery either. Lasith Malinga's four in four against South Africa at the 2007 World Cup was a Hat-Trick Plus; an otherwise entirely unmemorable bilateral T20I in 2019 was lit up by dint of Malinga repeating the dose. Akram's two ODI hat-tricks were in front of Sharjah full houses, within six months of each other and the latter in the Austral-Asia Cup final.

On the other hand, it's hard not to conclude with some T20 hat-tricks that they are little more than footnotes in a match summary, illustrated most vividly by the nature of the two hat-tricks in successive games taken by Pat Cummins. A bowler of such vast gifts and mastery, picking them off through mistimed hoicks and heaves to long-on, ramps to deep third and scoops to short fine leg is… so ordinary. Cummins used cutters cleverly, no doubt, but it was the hurry and rush of batters that wrought these hat-tricks. No wonder he didn't twig it for a bit after taking the first, against Bangladesh: it was merely another wicket in the endless wicket-letting that is T20 cricket.