Grade The Nations: T-20 World Cup Logos, Part One

Scott: The idea for this series, Grade the Nations, arose after several U.S. sports federations adopted new, much-improved logos in recent years; that made me think about where the new team logos fit in the wider constellation of U.S. national team logos, as well as how they compare to their peers from around the world. The task here is team logos, but the teams represent countries at the highest level of international sporting competition.

First up, the logos representing the 20 teams playing in the ongoing T20 Cricket World Cup, a tournament jointly hosted by the United States and the West Indies. Cricket is the second-most popular sport in the world, not far behind soccer, and is played just about everywhere that used to be part of the British Empire. Including the United States! In fact, the oldest known game between two national teams in any sport is the historic 1844 cricket match between teams representing Canada and the United States. Prior to the American Civil War, cricket looked like a better bet than baseball to emerge as the national pastime.

Anyway, cricket is a bat-and-ball game in which players exercise largely the same physical skills as baseball players, though the details of field setup, scoring, and offensive/defensive switches differ greatly. Cricket is played in several formats, with the most recent, “twenty-twenty” or T20, being a shortened version of the game designed to be played in the roughly 3-hour length of a baseball or gridiron football game. Right now, the world’s 20 best national cricket teams are assembled in stadiums across North America to determine a global champion in the T20 Cricket World Cup.

In this installment of Grade the Nations, fellow American crickethead Jim “Jimmer” Vilk joins me to discuss and grade the logos of each of the 20 national cricket teams contesting the 2024 T-20 Cricket World Cup. In this series, we pay particular attention to several key attributes of a national team sports logo, including: Does it clearly communicate the identity of the country or some attribute of the national team, like a nickname or mascot? Does it clearly communicate what sport is being represented? And, Is it a generally good design?

Jim: Thanks, Scott. A reminder: in this article we are dealing with the team logos only. Not the uniforms. Although, unbeknownst to Scott, I have added (at no extra cost!) a photo of each country’s uniforms. Just click on the name of the country to see what they’re wearing in the World Cup. Each photo gives you a pretty good view of the front and back, and you, the reader, can grade those as well if you desire. Today we will focus on Groups A and B, and tomorrow we’ll conclude with Groups C and D. Now, without further ado …let’s grade some logos!

__________

Group A
Canada

 

Scott: Ah, the True North Strong and Visually Muddled. The logo starts on the right with a distorted maple leaf, but it’s twisting and a bit misshapen, resembling flames in a windstorm more than a bit of greenery. Then the shape is interrupted by lines that sort of but don’t quite evoke the seam of a cricket ball, with a central element that sorta-kinda splits the difference between the stem of the maple leaf and the shape of a cricket bat, but the bat is curved like a scythe. And then the ends of the two non-leaf shapes have crayon-like edges. The logo clearly communicates country and sport only by dint of the bold, all-caps lettering that reads “Cricket Canada.” Ignore the writing and this looks more like a mid-1990s regional telecom company
than a national cricket team.

Grade: D+

Jim: Willow trees are famous for bending with the wind, so I’m perfectly fine with the bending willow bat. I also like the blending of leaf, ball and bat in the logo. That being said, Scott’s right. It does look like a telecom company logo from the days of dial-up internet…one of the better ones. I’m going to start off with a bang and give them a much better letter.

Grade: B

__________

India

 

Scott: Of the globally dominant national teams, India’s logo has more in common with England’s than with Australia’s. If you’ve ever dealt with Indian government bureaucracy, you’ll recognize the shapes and colors here; this logo looks like the official seal of some midlevel state bureaucracy. Railway safety inspectors? Postal rate commission? Stormwater runoff control district? Something like that would be well-served by a logo this simple and clean. National team in any sport, much less pride-of-the-nation cricket, not so much. It’s a generically competent logo. It’s clean. When you watch cricket, you learn to recognize it as representing India. But on its own? An underwhelming logo for one of the best teams, and many of the best players, on the planet.

Grade: C+

Jim: Not much to add here, as this time we’re almost in complete agreement.

Grade: B-

__________

Pakistan

 

Scott: The gold star, either metallic gold or sometimes yellow, on dark green has come to stand for Pakistan cricket almost as clearly as the Tiffany NY stands for the Yankees. The text in the star is the Urdu for the country’s name. Iconic, elegant, direct. And yet, also a bit lacking. No reference, overt or subtle, to the sport of cricket. On top of which, Pakistan wears the gold star as a chest logo, and for the current T20 Cricket World Cup, Pakistan wears a smaller five-point star atop the gold star to represent their 2009 World Cup championship, tipping simplicity over into a sort of baroque over-adornment.

Grade: B

Jim: At least there’s a C for cricket, but yes…I could use a little something more. I have no rooting interest in the…ahem… rivalry between India and Pakistan, and I’m going to be even more neutral by giving both of them the same rating.

Grade: B-

__________

Ireland

 

Scott: No text, just three shamrocks and a cricket ball with its distinctive seams rendered in an Emerald Isle green. Simplicity, elegance, clarity, quality. My only demerit, and it’s not quite enough to dock anything off my grade, is that it doesn’t clearly distinguish that this team represents all of Ireland, not just the southern Republic of Ireland. But that’s a decreasingly important distinction these days.

Grade: A

Jim: If there were three seams to go along with the three shamrocks, I would have given them an A+. Still, an excellent emerald effort!

Grade: A

__________

USA

 

Scott: This is what got me thinking about this series. Specifically, the changes – and vast improvements – in national team logos for USA Curling, USA Soccer, and USA Cricket. The pre-2017 USA Cricket logo would be dead last on this list. It featured a red ball with a white silhouette of an eagle with a random scattering of white and blue stars. If you needed a prop or set decoration with a logo for a cricket team in a 1970s sitcom, the old USA Cricket logo is what you’d get. The current logo, on the other hand, is among the best in any sport in the world. Blue with white elements on the top, red and white horizontal stripes on the bottom make it crystal clear what country this is. A cricket bat run diagonally across the stripes like a sash clearly states the sport, and the bat and stripes integrate nicely with one another. In terms of pure design, the integrated “CRICKET” text is redundant and should be eliminated. But it’s also par for the course for a national team logo to literally spell out the sport.

Grade: A

Jim: Being that we’re relative newcomers to this sport on the big-time international scene, I would keep the “CRICKET” text right where it is. Although in a few years we might not need it if we keep pulling off stunning upsets like this one. If only Al Michaels were there to call the action! Anyway, I sort of liked the old logo, but the new one indeed is a massive upgrade.

Grade: A+

__________

Group B

Oman

 

Scott: This logo is a choice. Specifically, the choice of a 13 year old in 1997 with a copy of MS paint and big ideas about cool logos. It’s a coin! With a cricket ball! A ball streaming flames of hot burning fire! Flames in the national colors of red and green! And the country’s name in English and Arabic! And multiple gradients! And consistent light sources for gradients are for suckers, baby! The red-and-green flames are actually a decent attempt at communicating national identity, and the cricket ball makes the sport admirably clear. But this is otherwise a sub-amateurish mess. In that I expect that if 100 Uni Watch readers submitted their own Oman Cricket logo redesigns, at least 96 of them would be miles better than this slapdash failure.

Grade: F

Jim: I can’t call it a complete failure because there’s absolutely no doubt what this logo represents. The idea is good but the execution is lacking.

Grade: D

__________

England

 

Scott: Ah, the three lions. Instantly recognizable to sports fans everywhere as the iconic symbol of England. Too bad that England Cricket neglected to add anything indicating which sport these particular three lions are playing. This is kind of a thing for England, though: Most English national team logos have three lions, maybe also some roses, and no indication of the sport the team plays. The standout is England’s national darts team, which has on its logo not three lions but three darts, each with the English St. George’s Cross. Go England darts! As a logo, this is perhaps the most elegantly drawn of all the many three-lions logos in the English sporting universe. It’s just a shame that the lions are effectively generic. Does this team play soccer,
cricket, or field hockey? Anyone’s guess!

Grade: B-

Jim: I’ve seen this logo many times, but never up close. Now that I have, and now that I’ve seen it rendered in white on their red uniform, I have a sudden craving for a liverwurst sandwich. Although the lions are a bit scary in a devilish way, I like it. Maybe a batting helmet with the crown logo above the lions would help?

Grade: B

__________

Namibia

Scott: Another that makes for an excellent national team logo except for lacking any reference to the sport. The stylized fish eagle is drawn from the Namibian national seal, and the medium blue is usually part of the team’s jerseys. The team is nicknamed the Eagles, so points for the spot-on simplicity of the image in a generally well-drawn logo. But the grade must reflect the utter lack of sport specificity.

Grade: B-

Jim: Looks more like a vulture to me. And the vulture should be carrying a cricket ball in its talons.

Grade: C+

__________

Scotland

 

Scott: This is the kind of thing I expect from the Dutch. The seams of a cricket ball transform into the petals of a Scottish thistle, which also double as motion lines giving movement to the ball, with the leaves of the thistle plant doubling as fiery wings around the ball. This could be a yorker hitting the turf about to bounce into the wickets to bowl out the opposing batter. It’s clearly Scotland, it’s clearly cricket, it’s a modern, well-drafted logo that combines sophisticated lines and negative space to tell a compelling story, and it scales extremely well. It’s recognizable in small embroidery at a distance, and it also looks good at billboard size.

Grade: A

Jim: This one messes with my eyes and my brain. Every time I look at it I see different things. Colors are nice, and yet I’m not going to be as kind as Scott. At least I’m not giving it a C, which is what I sometimes see when I focus outside of the ball.

Grade: B-

__________

Australia

 

Scott: Across all three formats of cricket, two teams currently rank in first or second place: India and Australia. Australia’s team logo checks all the boxes and stands out as a design worthy of a world-bestriding colossus of the sport. The four seven-pointed and one five-pointed stars of the Southern Cross refer to the dominant symbol of the national flag, but rendered in the distinctive green, gold, and white of Australia’s national teams. Behind the stars, a blazing sun rises over a globe that has across its meridian the three stripes used to depict the seam of a cricket ball. Unlike a baseball’s figure-8-shaped seams, a cricket ball has a single raised seam wrapped around the equator of the ball, a feature often drawn as three stripes circling the ball. Country and sport are clearly communicated, and the design feels both fresh and timeless.

Grade: A

Jim: Oh, you beauty! That’s a winner indeed. As they said in Monty Python, “Australia! Australia! Australia! We love you! Amen.”

Grade: A+

__________

That’s it for Part One. Tune in tomorrow, as Scott and I wrap up the World Cup, T-20 style!