Cricket is dead. Or at least, the version of it your grandfather used to fall asleep to on a humid Sunday afternoon is.

Ishan Kishan arrived at the Arun Jaitley Stadium in Delhi this week with a bat that looked less like a piece of willow and more like a blunt-force instrument of algorithmic destruction. He didn’t just play cricket. He conducted a stress test on the very concept of a boundary. By the time the dust—and the smog—settled, India had clocked the fastest team 100 in the history of the T20 World Cup. It was efficient. It was loud. It was deeply, fundamentally unsettling for anyone who still believes sport should have a rhythm.

The modern T20 game isn't about "finding gaps" anymore. That’s a legacy term, like "dial-up" or "BlackBerry." Today’s game is about data-driven bat speeds and the cold, hard geometry of a cleared fence. Kishan’s innings was a glitch in the simulation. He treated world-class bowlers like malfunctioning NPCs in a budget video game. The ball didn't just travel; it evaporated.

We’re told this is progress. The ICC wants us to believe that faster is better, that more noise equals more value. But look at the friction in the room. The broadcast rights for this tournament are priced at a level that assumes four hours of prime-time advertising. When India fires off a century in record time, they aren’t just winning a game; they’re cannibalizing the very revenue model that pays their salaries. Disney and the other rights holders didn't drop billions of dollars to watch a match end before the delivery guy arrives with your overpriced pizza.

There’s a specific kind of arrogance in this kind of dominance. It’s surgical. Kishan wasn’t sweating. He looked like he was checking boxes on a spreadsheet. Five years ago, a team 100 in under seven overs was a statistical outlier, a fever dream. Now, it feels like a software update. We’ve optimized the soul out of the swing. The bats are thicker, the boundaries are shorter, and the sensors embedded in the handles tell the coaches exactly how many Newtons of force Kishan is applying to a poor, defenseless leather sphere.

The Delhi crowd loved it, obviously. They’ve paid upwards of 12,000 rupees for "premium" seats that are essentially plastic buckets bolted to crumbling concrete. For that price, you want to see a car crash, not a chess match. They got their wish. But there’s a cost to this kind of acceleration. When everything is a highlight, nothing is. If every game features a "historic" carnage, the word loses its teeth. We’re reaching a point of sensory burnout where a 100-run stand feels as routine as a system reboot.

The tech-stacking of cricket is nearly complete. We have ultra-edge, ball-tracking, and wearable biometrics that monitor a bowler’s heart rate in real-time. We’ve turned a pastoral game into a high-frequency trading floor. Kishan is just the latest, most effective terminal. He isn't playing against the opposition; he's playing against the limits of physics, and right now, physics is losing.

It’s getting harder to ignore the feeling that we’re watching a sport eat itself. The more we lean into this optimized carnage, the shorter the shelf life of the spectacle becomes. We want the fastest, the biggest, the loudest—and we want it delivered in a 15-second vertical clip for social media. India gave the world exactly what it asked for in Delhi. They were perfect. They were unstoppable. They were terrifyingly efficient.

Which leads to the only question that actually matters in this new, hyper-accelerated era of the sport.

What happens to the game when the players finally get so good that the contest itself becomes boring?