T20 World Cup feels like overkill - Chris Waters

Granted, excitement could build if England go deep in the competition and perhaps even retain the title that they won in Australia in 2022.

But it feels - from a distance at least - like just another T20 event in a landscape positively saturated by T20 franchise competitions as it is, and at a time when our own Vitality Blast is also under way, chugging along like an old steam train in the background.

Overkill? You’d better believe it, buster, as they say in the States, which is co-hosting this World Cup along with the West Indies.

A World Cup, however, whatever the format, should always feel special, an event to be anticipated. But this has a somewhat ten-a-penny air about it, with not even the international aspect lifting it beyond the quotidian perhaps.

Hopes that this World Cup will help the game “crack America” - something that not even Cliff Richard was able to do - are pie-in-the-sky in the short term at least.

Of course, Major League Cricket (MLC) is now “a thing”, with plans to expand whatever that thing is exactly (another shallow T20 franchise competition, basically), and the sport will feature at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

But although there has to be more chance of the Americans understanding T20 than other forms of cricket, to pinch and adapt the patronising cliche, we are a long way yet from the days when ten-year-old Troy from Texas is likely to have posters of the world’s best players on his bedroom wall.

Much less that Troy, turning up his nose at an offer to go to the baseball or the NFL instead, would be heard bawling in chest-beating protest, “Mommy, I wanna go to the crick-eeet.”

It is always a good thing to “spread the word”, of course, but what is the word that is actually being spread? Basically, the one that prizes T20 and raking in the dollars; it is always about the lowest common denominator, the financial bottom line.

It is about increasing the prevalence of white-ball cricket to the inevitable detriment of red-ball, for where Test cricket fits into this picture is blindingly clear – it doesn’t. The one format of the game that really is worth prizing and protecting.

This World Cup is not only overkill but it is also over-crammed. There are a record 20 teams taking part, comprising the two host nations, the top-eight sides from the last World Cup, the next two teams in the International Cricket Council (ICC) rankings and eight nations who came through regional qualifiers.

Although that is good for the development and exposure of some, less good is the fact that competition debutants such as Uganda lost their opening match by 125 runs against Afghanistan after being bowled out for 58 in 16 overs. Ouch.

They’d have been crying in the streets of Kampala after that one - and so were those of us who prefer competitive contests to dull-as-ditchwater mismatches.

This World Cup will have more of an impact in the Caribbean than America, with the West Indies hosting 39 of the 55 games and set to make a $25million profit. That will help in terms of improving facilities in the region, while a good showing by the hosts will presumably generate excitement and interest.

White-ball rules the roost over there, of course, and the West Indies cannot be ruled out in their own backyard. For those of us who grew up watching their great Test side of the 1980s, however, there has been no greater sadness than to see how their red-ball has declined to the extent that they are now ranked eighth in the world, ahead of only Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Ireland and Afghanistan, a pitiful fall from grace.

Alas, the game is unrecognisable from those great days of the ‘80s.

T20 cricket has taken over, the sport having gone increasingly down the route of football, poisoned by the amounts of money that have flooded into it and by administrators who cannot see beyond the lure of pound signs.

It has also become increasingly dull; who wants to watch all this T20 anyway? As enjoyable as the format can be, there is simply too much of it, with franchise competitions springing up faster than weeds on a lawn, most of them a tragic waste of life.

When a World Cup merely adds to the saturation level, of interest primarily to those directly involved or connected somehow, a precious something has been lost, never to be recovered.

Far from a special event, something to be savoured, it’s "a dime a dozen” as the Americans say.