Major League Cricket coming to the Oakland Coliseum for historic June tournament

New York Times

26-03-2025

Cricket will be making its debut on the West Coast of the United States when Major League Cricket hosts a seven-day, nine-match event at the Oakland Coliseum. The Coliseum event, which runs June 12-18, will feature the first top-tier cricket matches played on the West Coast.
The week-long event kicks off MLC's third season and will be the first leg of a three-city schedule for MLC that will continue to Grand Prairie, Texas, and then to Lauderhill, Fla., before culminating in a championship match. It is the first time MLC has hosted matches in California and Florida. The 34-match schedule is its biggest so far and the largest top-tier cricket schedule ever hosted in the U.S.
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'Season three (of MLC) is a big step up, not just in the number of matches, but also the venues that we're going through too,' MLC CEO Johnny Grave said. 'Major League Cricket continues to grow with some of the best players in the world coming for this month of cricket celebration. We're serious about growing the game.'
Though not yet one of the major sports in the U.S., cricket is the second-most followed sport in the world and has continued to gain prominence in this country, especially following the national team's upset over traditional power Pakistan in the 2024 Men's Cricket World Cup. Some of the sport's top players participate in MLC, which runs its season to fit into the international cricket calendar.
MLC has six teams, including three West Coast clubs — the San Francisco Unicorns, Los Angeles Knight Riders and Seattle Orcas. According to the league, more than 100 million people streamed MLC matches or watched them on television around the world last year. The league plays in a Twenty-20 or T20 format, which is a more condensed version of traditional cricket matches and comprises two, 120-ball innings, one per team. T20 matches generally run a similar length to a baseball game.
Grave estimates that roughly $1 billion will be invested into growing cricket in the U.S. ahead of the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, where the sport will return for the first time in more than 100 years.
'Hopefully (the MLC tournament is) a big statement as to how big we think the sport can be in this country,' Grave said.
The MLC event comes to the Coliseum during a transitional period for the historic venue, which opened its doors in 1965 and until this season had annually hosted either professional U.S. football or Major League Baseball games (or both). The Oakland Raiders moved to Las Vegas ahead of the 2020 NFL season and the Oakland Athletics left the Coliseum at the end of the 2024 MLB season.
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In their place, the Coliseum is now home to the USL Championship league Oakland Roots soccer team, which broke a team record with more than 26,000 fans at their home opener last Saturday. MLC is hoping for similar-sized crowds for its event, which will include evening matches during the week and weekend day/night doubleheaders. General admission tickets are $20 and went on sale Wednesday morning on the MLC website.
'Bringing more of this kind of activity to the Coliseum brings the community together, and also creates jobs, and improves revenue to fund vital public services. Our region has the largest proportion of cricket fans in America, and the most passionate,' Oakland City Council member Rebecca Kaplan, who also serves in leadership on the board of the Coliseum Authority, said in a statement.
Because of its dimensions and location, the Oakland Coliseum has been an appealing target for those interested in hosting major cricket events in the U.S.
In 2022, Grave said the ICC was close to an agreement to have the Coliseum host 2024 Cricket World Cup matches before the negotiations fell through. Now that MLC is officially hosting matches at the Coliseum, Grave is hopeful that they will be able to continue to hold events there in the coming years. He believes playing at a venue like the Coliseum 'will hopefully turn a few heads and get Americans to think that there's a reason why cricket is the second-biggest sport, because it's one of the most exciting sports you can watch.'
'If we can bring the best stars in the world to the Bay Area, to such an iconic venue like the Coliseum, playing in the shortest format of the game played under lights, so people can go after school and work, then hopefully it's a winning formula to not just provide fantastic entertainment to loyal sports fans of the Coliseum, but also for cricket fans in the Bay Area,' Grave said.
Locally, playing matches in Oakland will be a boon for the San Francisco Unicorns, who will get to compete in front of their hometown fans for the first time (all previous season MLC matches were played in Texas or North Carolina). The Unicorns feature several internationally renowned cricket players, including Haris Rauf, opening bowler for the Pakistan national team, and Jake Fraser-McGurk, a member of the Australian national team who is currently playing in the Indian Premier League, as well as a local rising star, Sanjay Krishnamurthi, who attends San Jose State University.
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'We're very excited about bringing games to the Bay Area and to the very high-density South Asian market that lives here in the Bay Area because we know that cricket is more than a game to them — it's a religion,' San Francisco Unicorns CEO David White said.
'We know from all the stats and fan data that there's a huge audience for cricket in the Bay Area,' Grave added.
White spent last Saturday at the Roots home opener and was thrilled with the atmosphere the Roots brought to the Coliseum.
'They did a fantastic job,' White said. 'We'll be looking to replicate our own version of that.'
The Coliseum has the largest baseball playing surface in the U.S. and can therefore be most easily converted into an international standard cricket field. Though the Coliseum has seen numerous field conversions over the years when the Raiders and A's shared the stadium, the process of converting the Coliseum to feature a full-sized cricket playing surface will be unique.
Cricket utilizes a 22-yard strip called a wicket that will need to be 'dropped into' the Coliseum playing surface. The wicket that will be utilized at the Coliseum is currently in Nassau County, N.Y., where it was most recently used at the World Cup. The strip, which sits on a metal plate, will be trucked out to Oakland in two pieces. It will live in the parking lot of the stadium until it can be installed ahead of the MLC event and then uninstalled as soon as the event ends, so the Roots can continue their home schedule.
This field conversion process is commonplace in Australia and New Zealand, where professional cricket matches are often played in the same stadiums as Australian Rules Football matches, but it is rare in the U.S.
In addition to the tournament, MLC plans to make further investment into growing cricket in the Bay Area and around the U.S. MLC runs Minor League Cricket that develops talent throughout the country, and White said the Unicorns are looking into building a youth program in the Bay Area and eventually building a permanent cricket stadium for the team.
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'We want to make sure we're getting more kids into the game because we ultimately know that's the starting point,' White said.
Educating those in the U.S. without a cricket background about the game remains one of MLC's top priorities, but White is optimistic that the more exposure cricket gets to a U.S. audience, the more popular it will become.
'I do feel like there's a strong appetite to learn it as it's not a hard entry-point game,' White said, comparing it to baseball. 'Someone bowls a ball, same as pitching it, and then someone hits it, and the farther they hit it, the more runs they get. So it's, in that sense, quite easy to learn.
'There (are) obviously some nuances within the rules, but when you see exciting things happen on a regular basis (in the matches), that tends to excite people who want to come along.'
(Top photo of the Coliseum in 2024: Eakin Howard / Getty Images)