Do Australians really not care about the T20 World Cup?

How to spot the Aussies in a crowd? They'll be the ones proclaiming, loudly, that T20 cricket doesn't matter to them. Somehow, they restrained themselves from telling us this foundational truth until after their team became first-round roadkill in the men's T20 World Cup.

Now the notion of uncaring Australia is everywhere; in piece after piece, podcast after podcast and, apparently, pub after pub. So much so that you have to wonder why, if they really don't care about T20 cricket, they keep telling us they don't? Why don't they shut up and stop caring already?

Or listen to what Adam Zampa said when he was asked if that was true: "It's totally false. The time that the coaches and the staff put into how we're going to play our T20 cricket and who's going to play each role and our preparation is… I think they'd probably put as much time into that than they would with Test cricket. Potentially even more.

"In Test cricket, Australia and the top two or three teams are quite dominant. So I don't think the work is needed as much. Whereas with this format in particular it's a lot tighter. So the work is definitely there."

What, then, is the issue? "I think the Australian public struggle with the fact that they don't get to see much of the white-ball cricket we play," Zampa said. "We do a lot of our work away from the Australian time zones, so they don't get to see the way we kind of play and have prepared for these World Cups."

The argument that Australia's T20Is are not on free-to-air television has also been advanced. Most international cricket in India, England and South Africa is behind a broadcast paywall, and somehow their fans stay interested in all formats.

Then there's the proximity of the AFL season, which starts on February 5 – Aussies can't think about anything else, we're told. The Ashes started in November and ended in January, a direct clash with the English football season. Yet, and despite Australia dominating, England supporters remained engaged throughout.

But we are supposed to believe Australians don't give a damn that their team, having beaten Ireland, as expected, crashed to Zimbabwe two days later and to Sri Lanka three days after that to shamble out of the running for a place in the Super Eights. Four days later they hammered Oman in a rubber so dead it had to be exhumed before a ball could be bowled. But, hey, they don't care, remember.

Happily, not all Australians are in this sorry state of denial. Instead they've applied their mind to the repercussions. Here's Malcolm Knox in the Melbourne Age: "The bigger issues are how little the Australian cricket community cares, how it has detached itself from the rest of the globe, and the consequences of this insouciance. Merv Hughes has been representative of this view, asking on social media: 'What would you rather win, a 20/20 World Cup or the Ashes… I rest my case!'

"Merv is entitled to rest his case, but Australia didn't just not win the T20 World Cup. They didn't even get close to winning against Zimbabwe. They treated the biggest event on the 2026 cricket calendar as a post-season punt. Australia is looking at the game through the wrong end of a telescope.

"Meanwhile, here at home, there was a certain pride in not caring too much about another ephemeral T20 carnival. This is not only embarrassingly insular but concerning for the future. Cricket, like anything, follows its support base. While billions of supporters are gripped by the World Cup and cricket's centre of gravity lodges ever more deeply in Mumbai, Australia shrugs its shoulders, nurses its precious Ashes, and moves on to footy season.

"It's not Australia's failure in this World Cup that is the concern. It's the arrogance of not minding. It's the pride in dismissing cricket's biggest event as a passing sideshow that we really couldn't be bothered about.

"The world has changed. Australia's pride in its cricket legacy, warmed by another Ashes win, has been put in its place: a small place, backward-looking, and no longer big enough to dictate the future."

Ouch. If this is as Knox argues, Australian cricket is in deep trouble. But what if it isn't? Could it be that Aussies are interested only in tournaments their teams are good at winning? And, conversely, that they're insecure enough to deride or pretend to ignore the stuff in which they don't do well?

A certain kind of kid, when they are beaten in a backyard game, takes their bat and ball and goes home in an immature, petulant huff. It seems a particular type of Australian – who retires to bed early, who won't pay for particular television channels or doesn't have the money, who is incapable of paying due attention to more than one sport at a time, who thinks cricket is all about the Ashes – says they don't care about the T20 World Cup.

They will have to forgive us for not remembering them saying so when they reached the T20 World Cup semifinals in 2007 and 2012, when they made it to the final in 2010, and when they won it in 2021. Maybe what they really don't care for – not about – is losing.