S.F. Unicorns make long-awaited Bay Area cricket debut at Oakland Coliseum

San Francisco Chronicle​

18 hours ago

Thursday opened with a five-hour drive from Pismo Beach to the Oakland Coliseum for Neville Smeda, a native of South Africa who was initially skeptical of how Major League Cricket would logistically pull off its Bay Area debut. Smeda made it through the gates of the former home of Athletics baseball with about an hour to spare, proudly decked out in green and gold. He was not repping the A's.
The South Africa men's national cricket team, aka the Proteas, share the same colors.
Smeda rushed up the steps of the Coliseum, a storied venue that had never welcomed the likes of cricket across its 59 years in existence, with one thing on his mind: Could a baseball diamond be adapted to the oval shape characteristic of an authentic cricket field?
In the week leading up to the MLC season opener, a rematch of last year's finals between the San Francisco Unicorns and the reigning champion Washington Freedom, Smeda left the same comment on a number of the league's Instagram posts promoting cricket in the Coliseum: 'Is it oval?' He never received a response. But when the cricket purist saw the finished product for himself, he was more impressed than disappointed.
The field on which the Unicorns bested the Freedom by a score of 269/5-146 — the largest margin of victory (123 runs) in MLC history — did not appear as a perfect oval. Close enough, conceded Smeda, who marveled at the fact that a crowd of 5,126 people showed up to watch a cricket match in California.
'I watched five games last year in Dallas, that was an OK crowd,' Smeda said of Grand Prairie Stadium, MLC's staple site in Texas. 'Maybe the most was about 1,000 people.
'This, I think, is incredible.'
The sight was several years in the making. In 2022, MLC CEO Johnny Grave first identified the Coliseum as a potential forum for the 2024 ICC Men's T20 World Cup. The size of its playing surface, he said, was uniquely adaptable for cricket. The A's occupation at the time ultimately ruled the possibility moot.
Bay Area cricket fans may have been the only people who actually applauded the A's move to Las Vegas, and Sacramento in the interim.
'In order for it to have real sporting and cricketing integrity, we needed to play in venues where the boundary size, the size of the playing surface, was akin to all the best cricket grounds in the world,' Grave told the Chronicle. 'The Coliseum is the only baseball ground in the U.S. that has that size of playing arena.'
By the end of a seven-day stretch, nine MLC matches will be hosted in what was once the heart of Oakland sports, since abandoned by its marquee franchises. The Raiders left for Las Vegas in 2019, the same year the Warriors departed for San Francisco. And the A's are hosting a groundbreaking ceremony for their proposed ballpark in Sin City in less than two weeks.
Sabi Lali, a Unicorns fan dating to their inception in 2023, was just grateful he could watch a pro cricket match in person again.
Born and raised in India, home to the India Premier League, widely regarded as the best cricket league in the world, Lali has lived in the Bay Area for 15 years. The closest thing to live cricket he could find were community tennis-ball matches. Of course, he never stopped following his favorite IPL club, the Punjab Kings, as a native of the Punjab region. Most matches start around 7 a.m. PST, the start of a two-hour span when he shirks all fatherly responsibilities while his wife takes their two kids to school: 'I do not know my family during those two hours,' Lali joked.
As soon as the Coliseum matches were announced, Lali purchased $200 worth of tickets to make a family field trip out of cricket's historic introduction to the West Coast.
Because certain boundaries of the Coliseum's adapted cricket field were atypically narrow, sixes — the equivalent to home runs in baseball — soared into the stands at will. A whopping 19 sixes, the world record for modern T20 cricket (the sport's condensed three-hour format), were hit Thursday. As many fans had a chance to catch the game ball, albeit before throwing it back into the field of play, an unwritten rule of the sport.
Smeda's piece of advice for folks used to catching baseballs with a mitt: 'Get out of the way.' A cricket ball is heavier and harder than a baseball, despite how easy world-class cricket players made it look to catch with their bare hands.
One of the draws of MLC is how many top international talents the league has attracted. 'It's not just a slogan,' said Smeda, who especially lauded New Zealander Finn Allen, the Unicorns batsman who set a single-match league record for runs batted in (151) to avenge his team's championship loss to the Freedom a season ago.
'It was an amazing experience,' Allen said.
'We wanted to come out here, first time with Oakland, throw the first punch and put on a show.'
Well before the final result of Thursday's match rang out over the stadium intercom to celebrate the local Unicorns as victors, cricket won.
Smeda, who grew up playing cricket in South Africa from age 5, was in awe of the scene, marked by his beloved sport's uniquely diverse fan base all gathered in one place. The place in question being the Oakland Coliseum only sweetened the moment. It was proof of concept for what cricket, long renowned worldwide, could become in America — and especially in the East Bay, where diehard fans could finally emerge from obscurity Thursday.
'This is my happy space,' Smeda said.
'Cricket in America is one of those where you get nationalities from all over the world. I love to meet the Bangladeshi and the Pakistani and the Indian and the Sri Lankan and the Englishman and the Australian. I mean, there's just so much passion for it … which is one of the reasons I think (MLC) came to San Francisco because you have a very diverse population here.'