India's men have just won the T20 World Cup, and honestly, fair play to them. Huge achievement.

But I've surprised myself with how little I felt. Happy for the lads, sure, but the celebrations landed a bit… distant. Like I was watching other people's nostalgia.

Cricket was the bridge

I was born in India in the 90s and moved to the UK when I was 10. For years, cricket was the bridge between those two worlds. Growing up in the UK, it was the one thing that still felt like home without having to explain myself.

In the mid-2000s I was an absolute die-hard. I used to stay up until 3am to watch India play New Zealand, then stumble into school the next morning half-dead but buzzing. I knew every Tendulkar stat, every Sehwag mood, every Dravid innings that felt like it lasted a week. The game had a rhythm then. Even when it got tense, it somehow still felt calm. You could actually settle into it.

Somewhere in the early 2010s, I started drifting. Not on purpose. I just realised one day that I'd stopped planning my life around matches.

The sport got louder

I think a big part of it is the emotional tone. The sport feels louder now. More permanently "on". More geared towards confrontation and theatre. Less "watch the field change" and more "every moment has to be a statement". The chest-thumping, the send-offs, the constant edge. Sledging has always existed, but now it feels like it's part of the product.

And yes, I get the appeal. Kohli's intensity, for example, has been incredible to watch when you're in the mood for it. That competitive fire wins matches. I'm not denying that.

It's just that for me, it started to resemble the same aggressive lad energy I already see everywhere else. If I want shouting, posturing and people acting like everything is a fight, I can get that on the road, on the telly, in comment sections, outside a Wetherspoon pub on a Saturday night. When I sit down after a day's work, I want something that makes my brain quieter, not louder. I want skill, strategy, proper third man analysis by Nasser, Athers or Ponting in the commentary box, weird little momentum shifts. I don't want constant performative anger.

The counterargument

When I've said this to mates who still live and breathe the IPL, they basically say: "Things evolve. You don't go to a cyber café for the internet anymore, do you?" And they're not wrong. T20 has changed what sells. It's faster, more explosive, more highlight-driven. Aggression isn't new either. The Aussies were relentless back then. Ganguly literally waved his shirt at Lord's. Cricket has never been purely polite.

So maybe I'm just older, more tired, and less tolerant of noise. Maybe I'm romanticising the 2000s because that was when cricket was tied to family and childhood and staying up late felt like a life event.

What I actually miss

But I also can't shake the feeling that something has shifted in how the game is packaged, talked about, and consumed. Even fans sometimes sound less like they love cricket and more like they love domination. Like it's not enough to win. Someone has to be humiliated.

What I miss most is the sense of cricket as a shared ritual. Something you watched with family, half-listening, half-watching, letting it run in the background of a day. Now it can feel like a commercialised tribal battleground.