Reborn in the USA: has cricket finally cracked the American market?

Yahoo

23-04-2025

If you look south from the Manhattan end of Brooklyn Bridge, you can just about imagine the cricket field that used to be beneath what is now the South Seaport – and, if you squint, pretend that the people making their way around the bars and clubs and restaurants are the descendants of the same New York crowd who attended a match here between a local team and a London XI in 1751. Modern-day Manhattan is built on cricket pitches, among other things. They are there under the streets, among the farms and tenements cleared to make way for skyscrapers. There's another under Central Park, a third below the NYU Langone medical centre, where – in 1844 – Canada beat the USA by 23 runs in what is considered the first international fixture in all sport.
People have been dreaming of reviving American cricket ever since it died during the civil war, more than 160 years ago. It was killed by a shortage of pitches, kit and coaching, and by the rise of baseball, the great American pastime. Baseball had two advantages. It was easier to play – all you needed was a bat, a ball, four bases and a field – and if you were good at it, you could make a lot more money. Plenty of professional cricketers made the switch. The brothers George and Harry Wright, who had both played for St George's Cricket Club in New York, where their father was groundsman, were founding members of the first pro baseball team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings. Both are in the Hall of Fame, and Harry is still known as the 'father of the game'. Early proprietors such as AG Spalding, another ex-cricketer, sold baseball as the indigenous American sport. It was the patriotic choice. Cricket was inescapably English.
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Even so, it persisted into the 20th century in pockets of North America, especially around Philadelphia, where it had established itself as a country-club sport. But the USA were excluded from the game's new international governing body, the Imperial Cricket Conference, founded in 1909. By the time they were finally admitted to the renamed International Cricket Council, in 1965, cricket was a minority sport, played by expats on patches of parkland.
The Philadelphia Club is still the spiritual home of the game in the US, although the grounds are largely used for lawn tennis now – so more like the deconsecrated church of an extinct religion. Nearby is the CC Morris Cricket Library, which has the largest collection of cricket literature in the Americas. The odd truth is that, in the century since the great Philadelphian fast bowler John Barton King played his last game, the US has produced more great novels about cricket than it has great cricketers. In 2008, Joseph O'Neill published Netherland, which won the PEN/Faulkner award. O'Neill is Irish, and grew up in The Hague. He played age-group cricket and, after he moved to New York in 1998, he wanted to carry on. 'It was really a question of driving around, spotting people playing cricket and asking them: 'Can I play?'' he said.
There is cricket in New York, most of it in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. You can find the old Jamaican umpire Steve Bucknor out there most weekends, standing in local leagues filled with first- and second-generation immigrants. 'When I decided to write about this world, I didn't really have a big story in mind,' said O'Neill. 'But I had a couple of characters, people I'd met in the game, dreamers who were obsessed with cricket.' One inspired Chuck Ramkissoon, a key character in the novel – a charismatic fixer who is convinced cricket is a 'bona fide American pastime' and dreams of getting rich by building a stadium right in the heart of New York City: 'An arena for the greatest cricket teams in the world, twelve exhibition matches a summer, watched by eight thousand spectators at fifty dollars a pop.'
Related: The Spin | What will be the legacy of Cricket World Cup's New York adventure?
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Ramkissoon wasn't alone. In 2004, a real-life entrepreneur named Kalpesh Patel launched the Pro Cricket League, promising that 'in three years we will be an established entity'. It was shut down after a farcical first season. (One of Patel's innovations was the five-ball over: 'If you try to explain a six-ball over to Americans, they will say 'why six?' and we don't have an answer. If they say 'why five?' then it's easy maths.') Another entrepreneur, Jay Mir, started the American Premier League in 2009, and 13 years later staged a second season, blighted by complaints about non-payment of fees. Allen Stanford, the Texan fraudster who set up the Stanford 20/20, was so sure he could 'crack America' he spent $3m on a large test-marketing programme in Fort Collins, Colorado. The Cricket All-Stars exhibition series, led by Shane Warne and Sachin Tendulkar, managed three matches in New York, Houston and Los Angeles in 2015, but was scrapped before its second edition. Even O'Neill admits his own project was dreamy. 'People would ask: 'What's your book about?' When I told them 'It's about cricket in New York,' obviously they would say: 'That doesn't sound promising.''
Then there's the ICC. The Imperial Cricket Conference may have excluded the US, but its modern incarnation, the International Cricket Council, has made them a strategic priority. It launched Project USA in 2004, the year the national team qualified for the Champions Trophy in England (and were humiliated by New Zealand and Australia). In 2005, the ICC ditched the project, citing 'fundamental governance issues'.
There's never been any doubt about the US's large expatriate market. The country has always provided a large part of the audience for websites covering the sport, and is able to sustain a specialist subscription broadcaster, Willow TV. The Indo-American population grew by 50% in the 2010s, and is now almost five million, along with the best part of a million more Bangladeshi-Americans or Pakistani-Americans, and another 4.5 million Caribbean-Americans.
What it has lacked is an administrative body able to make anything of that audience, let alone bring the various communities, spread across an area near enough the size of Europe, into an organised whole. The USA Cricket Association was regarded, in the words of an ICC insider, as a 'basket case'. After a series of scandals, and three separate suspensions from the ICC, the USACA was expelled in 2017, and replaced two years later by USA Cricket – still a shoestring organisation, run by a small staff on a scant budget. It seems peripheral to the sport's accelerating development.
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Because it is accelerating, at last. The lure of the dollar was irresistible to the ICC, which relies so heavily on India, and is keen to stake a claim in the US, the largest sports market on earth. There are three strands to its plan. One is to support the growth of Major League Cricket, the six-team franchise league launched in 2023, and given official T20 status a year later. The second was to get the sport into the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028, which it achieved in October 2023. The last was to stage a major tournament, which was why, in 2021, the ICC gave the green light to a joint bid from Cricket West Indies and USA Cricket to host last year's T20 World Cup.
So, 15 years after Netherland, Ramkissoon's dream came true. Almost. The actual stadium wasn't in New York City, but Eisenhower Park in Nassau County, a 45-minute train ride away. And it wasn't permanent, but a great pop-up scaffolding palace. The stands were trucked in from Las Vegas, where they were used for Formula One races, and the beds for the drop-in pitches shipped up from Australia. The whole thing was put together in days, and cost around $30m.
There were two other venues – at Grand Prairie, a suburb of Dallas-Fort Worth in Texas, and at Lauderhill in Florida. The Florida leg was a washout, with two matches abandoned because of persistent rain and poor drainage. If the games had been in Grand Prairie, they would have gone off without a hitch. An old baseball stadium, it is the former home of the late Texas AirHogs, which has been converted into a cricket ground by MLC, which uses it as one of its two venues. The place was hit by a tornado in the week before the World Cup, but still got itself in shape for the opening group match, a reprise of the historic fixture between Canada and the USA.
Yet, if the games had been played at Grand Prairie, hardly anyone would have noticed. The Indian, Pakistani and Nepali Americans in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area were excited about the tournament, but nobody else had the faintest idea what it was, let alone that it was happening in the little ground out by the turnpike (to get there, take a left at the scale replica of the Taj Mahal by the local branch of Ripley's Believe It or Not!). The cricket was all people were talking about in the districts where the cricket fans lived, and ignored where they did not.
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Which was why the ICC decided it needed to play in New York, too. Call it the Frank Sinatra strategy: if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. It needed to whet America's appetite. And it worked. The US team, packed with talented players who had relocated from round the cricket-playing world, beat Canada and, better still, Pakistan. All of a sudden, the country discovered it had a cricket team. ESPN, which had warned the ICC it was unlikely to cover the tournament since it didn't have broadcast rights, featured it on its daily show. Media organisations who had shown no interest a week earlier made late requests for accreditation. One journalist pleaded that his editor-in-chief had demanded to know why they were the 'only mainstream publication in the US not writing about the cricket'. It all built towards the showpiece between Pakistan and India, which – according to the Nassau County police chief – would be 'like the Super Bowl on steroids'. It was a 34,000 sell-out, the largest crowd to attend a game of cricket in the US; the ICC's media team were delighted it included a scattering of celebrities. At Citi Field in Queens, thousands watched on the big screens.
It was a wildly ambitious project, and there were problems. The security was overbearing, the advertising around the city minimal, the fan zone at One World Trade often derelict, even on match days, and the drop-in pitches awful – palpably dangerous during the opening games, and nearly impossible to bat on thereafter. Sixes were as rare as home runs, which infuriated the broadcasters, and yet, when it was over, there was an unmistakable sense that it had worked – despite it all. Or perhaps because of it all, since the low-scoring pitches meant a string of exciting finishes. Independent research commissioned by the ICC suggested the tournament had received over 50,000 pieces of media coverage in the US alone, making it their second-largest market for the event. And the competition made over $500m – the most profitable the ICC had ever held.
So it was a surprise to find members of the ICC board giving anonymous briefings about how badly it had gone, amid 'outrage and alarm' about a $20m overspend. This, it turns out, had more to do with internal politics, not least the promise of the incoming chair, Jay Shah, to stop the ICC from wasting money – which could be redistributed to member nations who had elected him. It's unclear what will happen to the ICC's US strategy now Shah is in charge, and many of the people who drove the project have been moved on. But complaints about overspend have quietened since he took office.
New York's cricketers were perplexed by the whole thing, which passed through their city without affecting them. This could be considered a positive outcome, since one alternative had involved building the temporary stadium on their pitches in Van Cortlandt Park, wiping out their season. Instead, the authorities shut down the three golf courses in Eisenhower Park. Still, once the circus had moved on, the cricketers were left wondering about the benefit.
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Related: Howdy or howzat? When USA and Canada made cricket history in 1844
'The first thing they'd need to do is try and create one good cricket field,' said O'Neill. 'Just one, on a par with the worst cricket field in London – you know what I mean? There's just no grassroots investment. Zero. And that continues to be the case.' The problems are the same as they were 160 years ago: pitches, kit, coaching. The T20 World Cup did little to address this. Its legacy, so far as there was one, was that it piqued US interest in cricket, and provided proof of concept for the Olympics.
The eight drop-in pitches, though, do have a future. They will probably be bought by MLC, and perhaps installed at the Oakland Coliseum, a 46,000-seat on the west coast, and the one baseball stadium large enough to contain a cricket field. The ICC had considered using it itself, but there are plans to turn it into the home of MLC's San Francisco Unicorns.
That signposts the way the game is heading: it won't be the ICC that develops the sport, but MLC. Fundamentally unlike any of the US's earlier cricket leagues, it has serious investors, with serious money. They're members of the diaspora, too, just the same as the people playing in Van Cortlandt Park – but most have made a lot of money working in tech firms and venture-capital funds in Silicon Valley. They include Satya Nadella, chair of Microsoft; Shantanu Narayen, chair of Adobe; and Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, who were instrumental in the growth of Amazon. They also have strong ties with India: Mumbai Indians, Kolkata Knight Riders and Chennai Super Kings all have stakes in franchises. In two seasons, they have built a league containing teams that, the Unicorns' chief executive, David White, argues, would beat most Big Bash and T20 Blast sides. After the Unicorns signed Pat Cummins on a four-year deal, he was asked why he had chosen MLC ahead of the Hundred, which overlaps with it. Cummins said he simply 'hadn't thought' of the Hundred.
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MLC is planning to expand. It already has a Minor League, and some sides have established academies. Investors say the next step will be to develop venues. There are plans to build one in Brooklyn, near the spot Ramkissoon imagined. It may end up hosting Olympic cricket, given that Nita Ambani – who sits on the board of the International Olympic Committee – is one of the investors.
There's little doubt the US is capable of staging the Olympic event and a high-end, made-for-TV league – and of filling grounds with the Indo-American community. Given the sums involved, the acumen of the people behind MLC, and the support of Indian investors, they could even win the race to become the world's second-best T20 competition.
This ought to be enough. So it was a surprise to find that the men behind it want more – that they are harbouring their own versions of that same old dream. 'I know it sounds daunting,' Sivaramakichenane Somasegar, co-owner of the Seattle Orcas, said. 'But in my mind, the interesting thing here is to see cricket become a mainstream sport. It's going to take decades: it is not an overnight thing. The closest analogy I can give you is what happened to soccer in the US. Go back to the 60s and 70s, hardly anybody knew soccer, and even in the 90s it was not well thought of. But the World Cup happened here, and Major League Soccer was launched, and people started to feel it could be serious.'
There are differences. A football match lasts only 90 minutes. Even a three-hour T20 match is a stretch, when baseball – which runs to the same sort of length – is doing everything it can to cut down the duration of games. Football also had a significant playing base among the school and college populations, even if they didn't pay to watch it at the weekend.
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Participation in cricket remains small, but it is rising, and being taken up by an increasing number of inner-city schools as a way to engage with the growing Asian-American and Caribbean-American populations. America is changing, and cricket can be part of its modern, multiracial identity, just as rodeos and Nascar driving are for another chunk of the population. Whether it can ever become bigger, and reach those without a family background in it, is another question. The proposal is so ambitious you feel it must be beyond reach.
During the T20 World Cup, I met exactly one new fan, an elderly golfer in Nassau County who wanted to find out what all the fuss was about, and why his course had been shut to make way for cricket. One new fan seems a small return on a $30m investment. But then, as a couple of those MLC investors might tell you, even Amazon started small.
This piece is an edited extract from the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 2025, released on Thursday 24 April. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Quote of the week
I used to drink maybe a litre of milk spread throughout the day. But four litres, it's too much for anyone' – MS Dhoni addresses rumours that he drinks five litres of milk every day. He also denied that he makes lassi in his washing machine. He did, however, once force the entire Chennai Super Kings team to move out of their hotel and into a different one after he wasn't allowed to eat his own biryani.
Stunning Suryavanshi
Having by now just about picked ourselves off the floor and forced closed our slack jaws, it would be remiss to let the astonishing arrival of Vaibhav Suryavanshi go unremarked upon. On Saturday, at the age of 14 years and 23 days, Suryavanshi became the first player born since the advent of the Indian Premier League to play in it – as Rajasthan Royals' opening bat, no less – and then struck a magnificent six off his first ball and put together an innings of 34 off 20 as he started his side's ultimately futile chase of 181 against Lucknow Super Giants.
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Suryavanshi had already become the seventh youngest player in the history of first-class cricket when he made his debut for Bihar against Mumbai in the Ranji Trophy last January, at the age of 12 years and 284 days, and the question now is whether he goes on to be an Alimuddin (the youngest ever first-class cricketer, aged 12 years 73 days on debut, who went on to play 140 first-class games including 25 Tests for Pakistan) or a Royston Gabe-Jones (the youngest to appear in the County Championship, aged 15 years and 274 days on debut, and never heard of again). Early signs are certainly promising.
England have never been very good at promoting youth: 26 men have made their Test debuts for the country before they turned 21, fewer than any other country that has been playing Tests for more than a decade – the rival numbers are 27 for Zimbabwe, 29 for Sri Lanka, 31 for South Africa, 32 for New Zealand, 34 for Australia, 37 for Bangladesh, 40 for West Indies, 49 for India and a frankly wild 84 for Pakistan (which doesn't even include Alimuddin, who didn't play his first Test until he was 23). If some other country's records look only marginally different, remember that Zimbabwe have played 122 Tests over 32 years to England's 1,083 over 148, that Sri Lanka have played only 30% of England's games, and South Africa just over a third. But perhaps that is changing, given that just last year 16-year-olds Rocky Flintoff, Farhan Ahmed and James Minto became the youngest County Championship debutants in the histories of Lancashire, Nottinghamshire and Durham respectively, and James Coles broke Sussex's record in 2020.
Memory lane
On the subject of juvenile debutants, Charlotte Edwards became England's youngest Test player, either men or women, when she made her debut against New Zealand in 1996 at the age of 16 years and 208 days (in 2005 she was overtaken by the current record-holder, Holly Colvin, who was 15 years and 336 days old when she faced Australia at Hove). Edwards' father, Clive, a farmer, was present to watch her play but had been late to hear about her call-up: 'I didn't hear the news directly because I was irrigating the potatoes at the time,' he told the Guardian's reporter on the scene (of Edwards' debut, not the potatoes), Paul Weaver. Here she is at Lord's the following year with the former prime minister John Major, her England teammate Clare Connor, and the then Vodafone chief executive, Chris Gent. Last month Connor, now deputy chief executive of the England and Wales Cricket Board and its managing director of England women, appointed a now 45-year-old Edwards head coach of the England team.
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