Jono
Virat Kohli (c)
This is not true. Every tri-series and ODI bilateral series felt like life and death in the late 90s and early 2000s, and teams always played their best teams. There was no resting, there was no rotation. Winning a tri-series in Australia was a huge deal.tbh I'm probably more excited for JAMODIs that I can actually watch now than I was when I was younger. Being older and busier plus having a missus who can't stand cricket means that any cricket I can sit down and watch for a concerted period of time is a rare treat.
Also I don't get the whole "JAMODI" thing at all really because didn't ODI meaninglessness and over-saturation peak like 15-20 years ago? If anything the amount of ODI cricket has declined, right? It seems contradictory to me that the somewhat snobby (I mean that in the nicest possible way) CW crowd have allowed (presumably) the existence of T20 to diminish their appreciation of ODIs for ODIs sake, cos ODIs are just better cricket, surely? I can't really think of any reason why I would be LESS interested in an ODI now than I was in 1998, if anything I'm more appreciative that it isn't T20 and feels more like real cricket, the stuff I grew up on.
Bilateral ODI series didn't need to have all of this "context" to mean something in the 90s so why can't we care about them now? IT'S STILL REAL TO ME DAMMIT.
Now best players are often rested in ODI bilateral series. See Ashwin vs. England and Smith and Warner vs. Australia as two very recent examples.
The fans didn't just overnight say "I do not care about random ODIs anymore". The whole cricket world did.