A smile plays upon the edges of Josh Hazlewood’s mouth. This, to be clear, is not a fleeting reaction to some momentary amusement, but a more or less permanent feature. Over the course of a couple of conversations, one in Canberra and the other a few days later in Brisbane, it is almost always there – the smile of a man who seems to have cracked the T20 code.

Hazlewood’s rise in this format has been very recent and bewilderingly rapid. For most of the 31-year-old’s career he was assumed to be terrible at it, and having made his T20 international debut in 2013 he played nine games for his country over the next eight years.

“I just didn’t play it, to be honest,” he says. Before the first game of Australia’s T20 World Cup defence, against New Zealand on Saturday, the total number of T20s he has played for his country and various franchise teams stands at 89 – fewer than Harry Brook, the 23-year-old who has only recently broken into the England side, and less than half the total of Afghanistan’s Mujeeb Ur Rahman, 10 years his junior.

Everything changed in June 2021, when a number of players including the seamers Pat Cummins, Daniel Sams and Jhye Richardson, tired of life inside biosecure bubbles, chose not to take part in Australia’s white-ball tour of West Indies, and Hazlewood stepped in. At that stage he had played 10 T20 matches in the previous five years. Five months later he had won the game’s two biggest prizes, the IPL and the T20 World Cup, and a year later he was officially named the world’s No 1 T20i bowler.

His ascent is more remarkable because in a world of rapidly changing time signatures, Hazlewood is a metronome, known most of all for repeatedly landing the ball on an ideal line and length.

“I’ve got some changes but not big ones, I don’t think,” he says. “I’m always working on trying to get better ones. You often find guys with strange actions or very fast arms have good changes of pace because they can deceive you, but for a rhythmical bowler like myself changes of pace are going to be hard. It’s just subtle changes here and there.”

Throughout those years when the game seemed to have left him behind he never lost faith that he could flourish in the format, but neither did he devote much time to trying to make it happen. “I always thought that if I got a good run at it I could learn on the go and be effective,” he says. “I think if I played a lot of games in a row and wasn’t effective then that’s probably when you’d [think] maybe the format’s gone.”

One thing that makes his explosive return to T20s all the more remarkable is that during his time in the wilderness he not only did not train specifically for it, he did not even watch the shorter-form games. “I don’t watch much cricket in general, to be honest,” he says. “If we’re coming up against Sri Lanka down the track I might watch a little bit of their games but usually there’s enough footage to watch in bowling meetings. So yeah, I hardly watch any cricket.”

Would he say, then, that he genuinely likes cricket? “I like playing it,” he says. “If there’s a huge game I might switch it on, or if I know someone well who’s playing I might give it a watch, but otherwise I’ll more watch footy, rugby league. I like watching golf. I’ll watch a bit of that.” Once he retires, he says he is likely to leave the sport entirely unless a “very part-time” opportunity takes his fancy.

In many ways Australia’s journey at the last T20 World Cup was similar to Hazlewood’s, only his took the best part of a decade and his team’s was condensed into a few weeks: initially much fancied, then completely written off, and then, unexpectedly, all-conquering.

“I guess you can say that,” he says. “You probably get caught up in the team environment, and the team’s doing all these things and you forget that your role’s actually growing and getting better. The same at Chennai [where he won the IPL] – I felt like I just jumped in halfway through the tournament, jumped on the back of what they were doing, and just played my part. You just get caught up in the team aspect.”

Covid perhaps helped with that: being trapped together in bubbles might be boring, but it also helps to forge strong bonds. “That added to our team last year, the success and dynamic, and it’s not going to be the same atmosphere here,” Hazlewood says. “It’s not going to recreate that bubble where we can’t go anywhere, we can’t do anything, we’ve got no families. It was very much a team thing last year – we played a lot of golf, we had a good time and we were always together. We’re still trying to recreate that same atmosphere – it’s still very much fresh in the minds of everyone, and it’s still the nucleus of that team.”

Much of this nucleus is also involved in the Test side, and once the World Cup is over they will start to turn their attention to next summer’s Ashes series. Hazlewood says he is “really keen”, having missed most of Australia’s thrashing of England last time out after picking up a side strain in the opening game – “I didn’t see the rest of the series, I just switched off and spent some time with the family” – and is intrigued to see how England’s have changed under Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum. “Oh, I’ve heard about it,” he says. “But I haven’t seen any of it, really.”