Australia won the World Cup, but they couldn’t have a full heroes’ return home because they have a lot of cricket games coming up. On Thursday, they play India in the first game of a Twenty20 series, four days after playing them in the one-day final.
Australia won the ODI World Cup for the sixth time with a shocking six-wicket win over India on Sunday in front of nearly 100,000 devoted fans in Ahmedabad. India had never lost a match before.
The world cricket calendar, on the other hand, meant that the parties had to be short.
Seven players from the winning ODI team will be back for the five-match T20 series. These players include Travis Head, who hit a hundred in the final, Glenn Maxwell, and Steve Smith.
That meant that the rest of the one-day team had a low-key return. They went home in groups, and captain Pat Cummins was one of the happy ones who arrived in Australia on Wednesday.
It was a long way from the loud ticker-tape parades that Australian cricket teams used to enjoy after wins.
As he arrived home in Adelaide, wicketkeeper-batsman Alex Carey told reporters, “We’ve all gone our separate ways. There are T20s coming up, and some guys are on planes right now getting home as well.”
He said: “It’s probably pretty odd scheduling now that you look at it, to win a World Cup and a few days later you’re playing again.”
The series starts in Visakhapatnam and goes to four different places before ending on December 3 in Bengaluru. India has named a nearly entirely different team for this one.
Suryakumar Yadav, one of only three players kept from India’s World Cup team, will be captain for the first time since Rohit Sharma won’t be there.
Michael Vaughan, who used to be captain of England, was not nearly as polite as Carey when he talked about India and Australia possibly meeting again so soon.
Following David Warner’s decision to pull out of the series on Tuesday, Vaughan wrote on social media, “As all the players who won the World Cup should.”
“They should have been pulled out to allow them time to recover but importantly get back to Oz to enjoy the celebrations.”
Even more bluntly, Vaughan, who is now a well-known commentator, called the show “complete greed and overkill” last week.
“Why can’t we give players a break after a World Cup or give the winner a couple of weeks to celebrate properly?” he wrote on X, which used to be called Twitter.
The Age newspaper reported that the World Cup trophy is still in India and won’t be returned to captain Cummins until next week. This year, Cummins led Australia to win the World Test Championship and keep the Ashes.