Writing about cricket is hard, and not just because I had to do five days of basketball where a team I covered played on all five days during two major events in the modern history of cricket. The good news is, my sleep schedule was already broken at a time when the Australian women ripped through India at the WACA in Alyssa Healy’s farewell to the international game, and the Indian men offered a mirroring performance hours later by demolishing New Zealand’s bowling attack on a pitch that offered them the ball on a silver platter.
There’s a lot to get pissed off about in those events.
I’ll be honest: I did not want India to win the T20 World Cup, no matter how inevitable the outcome was, because I knew it would be co-opted by hard-right nationalists looking for an easy rally ‘round the flag moment and I’m sick of these losers trying to poison sports for their own gain. This was not difficult to foresee given that Gautam Gambhir is, well, a hard-right nationalist: he served in the Lok Sabha under the BJP banner until four months before he succeeded Rahul Dravid as India’s head coach in all formats. He is on the shortlist for the most insufferable person in international cricket, a staggeringly joyless and charmless man who can’t even take the time to celebrate a T20 World Cup without being a self-congratulatory dick. He’s not even that good of a coach; a sufficiently motivated cat could have delivered India a T20 World Cup at home with this roster, and he nearly sank the unsinkable and made his assistants face the press instead when it went wrong. He is not a great ambassador for the Indian game, but he is a perfect encapsulation of its off-field dynamic: a brazen network of Good Ol’ Boys convinced of its own infallibility and deeply unconvincing in its ability to do anything other than exploit the dreams and passions of a nation for its own gain.
I didn’t want that guy to get an ounce of validation. I wanted the hurt that New Zealand put on his ODI squad - and the downright pantsing of his test squad in 2024 - to continue in the shortest format. I was hoping the West Indies would magically learn how to catch. I was hoping Harry Brook wouldn’t be a doofus. Clearly I was up against it, but knowing how much more I was going to have to listen to a man with a face like Squidward’s house tell me how every good thing was his idea and every bad thing was beyond his control, I was totally on board with the idea of a miracle.
In the end, we got something more enjoyable (although much less funny) than my spiteful miracle: a three-game stretch from Sanju Samson that will be remembered forever.
Samson has been on the periphery of the India setup for some time now, having been selected for the 2024 T20 World Cup but never playing. He was not part of the squad that faced the United States in Mumbai to open the 2026 tournament, nor did he play against Pakistan in what was ostensibly “the big one” in the group stage. He didn’t play in South Africa’s spectacular rout of India in the Super Eights, either, but when the chips were down against the West Indies and India needed to get out of a hole, he delivered a mighty 97* while the rest of the top order flopped around him to muscle India over the line and into the semifinals. Then his 89(42) against England laid a foundation for a game India won by the skin of its teeth. Then he drilled 89 off 46 and pushed India to the brink of 100 runs in the power play against New Zealand with an effortless power and grace that was truly awe-inspiring. He was easily the tournament’s most outstanding player and was complemented brilliantly on the night of India’s victory by Jasprit Bumrah in the opposite innings.
Bumrah has the most immaculate vibes of any player in international cricket and stands as a total antithesis to his head coach. He combines the relentless lethality of a T1000 with the wide-eyed delight of a golden retriever chasing down a frisbee. Every batter he faces is absolutely terrified of him - it’s a downright spiritual experience to watch the man and the way he affects the game not just with skill, but with presence. He brought the house down on India’s rout of the Black Caps on Sunday and put down another marker in what is easily the greatest 24 month span for any Indian fast bowler ever, and for any fast bowler this century regardless of origin. He did it all with the same 10,000 watt smile and casual demeanor that he brought to trying different snacks during India’s England tour. He simply refused to let India lose even when they were stumbling over their own feet, and he was predictably elite in a big spot in the final.
Those two brought forth such unbridled joy and triumph that Gambhir sloughed right off what was supposed to be the moment he was ensconced as the only man who could lead Indian cricket. It was glorious, and it hardened something that has been rolling around in my head for a while: not only that widespread joy trumps narrow spite, but also that joy will outlast everything else and often occurs in spite of the people and things that undermine it or seek to bring it to heel.
The same lesson had been established in the wee hours of the same morning in Perth, in a farewell to one of the sport’s most popular figures at the end of her playing career (though not her career in cricket). In fact, I was ready to write a scathing piece on how the modern landscape of women’s cricket is a fig leaf for the Full Member boards (and for virtually all cricket boards) to posture themselves as engines of progress in cricket, and that they should be ashamed of themselves for such a profound failure in their duties to the game. Women’s test cricket is embarrassingly sparse; only four countries have played a women’s test in the last 20 years, and three Full Members (Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan) have never played one at all. Even the ones who do play it regularly are prone to gaffes and own-goals, like Kashvee Gautam playing in her test debut for India with white tape over the name plate on Harleen Deol’s jersey as if the extravagantly wealthy BCCI was incapable of contingency planning. That’s embarrassing enough for Kashvee, who fought a valiant but ultimately futile rearguard action in the first innings, but it’s downright pathetic for a board of the BCCI’s largesse to have that kind of basic oversight when they need a matter of hours to drop a $14m bonus on the men’s team for winning the T20 World Cup. There’s lots in there worth railing against, and righteous fury comes to me easily these days.
But you know what? Screw ‘em. Those losers don’t matter. Alyssa Healy does, and Lucy Hamilton will very soon. Holy smokes, kid.
No matter how much she tried to fight it - and she very much did not want the spotlight - this was Midge’s moment. Her silhouette was painted on the field. They named the grassy seating area “Healy Hill” in her honor. She was carried off the field by her teammates at the end even though she refused to promote herself to open the batting for a trivial chase of 25 to win the match on the third day. She is a powerful icon of Australia’s dominance in the women’s game in the 21st century as the first-choice wicketkeeper for a team that won six of seven Women’s T20 World Cups between 2010 and 2023 and two of the three Women’s Cricket World Cups in that span. She has been a hero for Australia, and she will continue to be a great presence and advocate for the game as she moves into a more robust commentary role that will allow her to continue living out a fantasy of every woman married to a straight man - roasting his golf game on national TV.
At the end of her career, nothing could dent Healy’s celebration. Not the dysfunction of women’s cricket in what feels like an adolescent phase for the game globally, not post-prime Katy Perry singing while surrounded by gendered cricket bats sporting eyelashes and lipstick, not the fact that a Full Member nation has made enemies of the state out of its women cricketers to the point that her own country has kicked around bankrolling a national team for them while the country and board in question face no consequences. This was about the good things that Healy, and the game more broadly, have delivered to us over the last 16 years.
At the end of the Winter Olympics, Rodger Sherman wrote a phenomenal piece on his newsletter Sports! in which he laid out the case for being proud and enthusiastic about Team USA (except the men’s ice hockey team) in grim times for America both at home and abroad. Times have gotten worse for America in the few weeks after he wrote it, and we’ve made times even worse for other countries in that time, but we can still hold fast to triumphs that occur in defiance of the prevailing ideology of our government and the incoherent despot holding it hostage. The same is true of cricket: its noxious cocktail of all manner of forms of nationalism, chauvinism, post-imperialism, and elitism perpetuated by the most miserable people a well-adjusted human could ever dream up can only frame our experience with the game if we allow it to. We are the ones who set the parameters for our experience with cricket; we must demand better from the game, but we cannot lose touch with the things about this game that bring us joy. Otherwise, we simply become a mirror of the same sourpuss jerks and power-obsessed weirdos we decry. I’ve spent a lot of time, energy, and column inches decrying them, but a funny thing happens where the more joy I feel about the game, the less important those dorks get, and the less power they have over my experience with the game.
The human brain is not meant to process the scale of daily atrocity fed through our eyeballs by social media. That has been true for years, but it’s something we are all acutely aware of in 2026. We are baited into anger or brow-beaten into fear and deep sadness as the US government tries to get back to the top step of the podium in the Crimes Against Humanity Grand Prix with backing from those seeking to preserve their ill-gotten wealth and tenuous power while the entire society beneath them rots in the aforementioned emotions. Joy is not a coping mechanism, though; it’s the thing that keeps us from acquiescing to people who look at Warhammer 40k’s Imperium of Man as aspirational. It galvanizes us by underscoring that something better is possible and gives us hope that our demands for our sports and our society to do better will actually bear fruit, even if it takes longer than we want it to. To know joy is to know resilience in the face of dystopia and understand that the people seeking to corrupt the game to their ends or the systems that fail those they claim to nurture will never be celebrated. They will not win; even if they are party to victory, they will always be upstaged by those in the arena doing the extraordinary, and they will always be mad about it.
Perhaps that is the greatest, most enduring joy of all.