India won the T20WC yesterday becoming the first team to
Win it thrice | Win it at home | Win it back to back |
Won 3 ICC trophies back to back to back. I always knew this day was coming.
The Golden Age is not arriving. It has arrived.
Badshah’s structural point is right as far as it goes. A country of 1.4 billion people that loves one sport above all others was never going to stay second once the money came. The BCCI’s TV deal money, the IPL pipeline, the depth of the talent pool no. Bangladesh, Pakistan, the West Indies may genuinely no longer able to compete at the same level. Nothing can deny India, that is Bharat, waking up to her Destiny as a Global hegemon (InshAllah this prefaces greatness in others spheres of National Excellence).
But I want to push back gently on the linear framing. More wealth, more wealth, more wealth; therefore dominance. The model minority version of sport & geopolitics. It’s not wrong, but it’s incomplete.
War is what is in your belly
My Urdu teacher told me something interesting: war isn’t just about your technology. It’s what you have inside your heart. Sports exists, in part, as simulated war. And what makes sport compelling, what makes it actually compelling, not just statistically interesting, is that once the conflict starts, you genuinely don’t know what will happen.
Who is David? Who is Goliath?
Israel’s per capita income is roughly eight times Iran’s. Iran’s population is nine times Israel’s. By any linear economic model these two countries shouldn’t be each other’s equal. Yet they have fought each other to something close to a draw, Israel’s technological sophistication and Western capital integration on one side, Iran’s ballistic missile programme, geographic depth, and proxy network stretching from Hezbollah to the Houthis on the other. Neither has knocked the other out similarly as in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. That is the argument against economic determinism written in blood. Economy does not automatically transfer into will, cunning, sacrifice, or the capacity to absorb punishment and keep fighting.
Usha & JD
Usha Vance is probably the better student. JD Vance is Vice President. There are human variables, guile, treachery, timing, the willingness to do what the other side considers beneath them, that don’t show up in the growth charts.
The Rise of a System
This is why India’s cricket dominance is the right metaphor but needs handling carefully. India didn’t win three consecutive ICC trophies because it got richer. It won because it built systems, yes, but also because something shifted in the mentality; the 2007 T20 World Cup generation, the IPL pressure-cooker, a conveyor belt of players who have been in high-stakes situations since they were teenagers. That coldness is cultivated, not purchased.
The Belgium Question
Another counter to the size-equals-dominance assumption in a way that sharpened the argument. Belgium is extraordinary at football. A country of eleven million people that has produced De Bruyne, Hazard, Lukaku, and a generation that reached number one in the FIFA rankings. Size and sporting success don’t correlate the way the linear model assumes. It’s about institutions; the coaching pipelines, the youth academies, the culture of development that a small, serious football nation built deliberately.
Aussie Premium
When India wins at cricket, the narrative in certain quarters is: of course, inevitable, they have the money and the population. When Australia wins, it’s greatness. It’s the Sheffield Shield, the culture, the toughness, the system. The same win, framed entirely differently depending on who achieved it. The reverence is withheld. India’s victories get explained away by demography and BCCI cheques rather than credited to what they actually represent; a system that was built, not inherited. This is the model minority dynamic applied to sport. The assumption that success from a certain kind of country is structural rather than earned, statistical rather than willed. It’s the same condescension. And it’s wrong in the same way.
A Holiday from History
The question for India in the multipolar world is whether that same coldness is being cultivated in the harder domains. China grew in a holiday from history; thirty years of American-guaranteed order, patient accumulation, no serious adversary pressing back. India grows with headwinds live. Pakistan, China, now the entire Shia-Muslim-GS axis consolidating behind Iran as a post-colonial symbol, none of these are pausing while India compounds.
War is the new Sport
BB is right that the inflection point is real. But the game from here isn’t linear. Every rival is incentivised to grow just as fast, to find their own cunning, their own guile. The unknowability that makes sport and perhaps geopolitics, with its attendant consequence, worth watching; that’s the actual condition India is operating in now. The Golden Age is here. Whether it compounds or gets contested is the open question. And open questions, as any cricket fan knows, are exactly where it gets interesting.
One of the great parts about this win is the self-loathing and anger it has led to in the Pakistani fanbase.
Babar fans going after Shaheen.
Shaheen fans going after Babar.
Just amazing.
I’ll write another post on this.. lol
The Pakistani elite are simply not able to accept the fact that Ind-Pak “sem2sem” is evaporating day by day.
check your email
Haven’t seen anything.
“Yet they have fought each other to something close to a draw”
Are you serious? Have you looked at the damage assessments? And is this the conclusion you draw?
who do you think is winning or losing?
lets define ‘winning or losing’ here.
Plunging the global
Economy into chaos ..