Will Cricket Fly in America? The Sport, Not the Insect
This summer a six-team professional professional league premiered in the U.S. and drew large crowds. Can the centuries old British sport find a following in the U.S
2011 cricket match, photo credit: isitsharp
History was made in American sports last month. But even the most hardcore sports enthusiast can be forgiven for not knowing.
The historic event? An American major cricket league played its inaugural season.
Over the course of two-and-a-half weeks, teams from six cities competed on a compressed tournament-like schedule near Dallas, Texas and outside of Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. They played a fast-paced version of cricket known as T-20, which is quite different from traditional test match cricket matches which can last up to five hours. T-20 matches take three-plus hours.
The first eight matches in the new Major League Cricket were held in Grand Prairie, Texas; the next seven in North Carolina. The playoffs and championship match took place once again in Grand Prairie at an old minor league baseball stadium that was refurbished for cricket.
In the final, on July 30th, MI New York defeated the Seattle Orcas before a sold-out crowd of more than 7,000.
“MI New York Captain Nicholas Pooran smashed 137 runs from only 55 balls to help his team make light work of surpassing the Seattle Orcas’ total of 183 runs to claim the championship,” it said in the email I received from MLC. “The West Indian star struck no fewer than 13 sixes into the night sky to etch a place in history for MI New York."
Most of that account was incomprehensible to me. The three New York daily newspapers made no mention of the hometown team’s triumph.
On a blistering hot afternoon in late July, I attended my first cricket match at the MLC site in Morrisville, North Carolina. The Texas Super Chiefs were playing the San Francisco Unicorns. Traffic leading to the Church Street Cricket Pitch was thick. I parked in a field about a quarter mile from the venue and joined the stream of fans walking to the game. Almost all of them were South Asian. I heard more Hindi than English.
Texas Super Chiefs vs. San Francisco Unicorns, Morrisville, N.C.
I sat in a temporary grandstand overlooking the round-shaped field. That was my first surprise. I had no idea the field would be round. The rectangular area where the bowler (thrower) and batsmen face off was far away. The mood was festive. Music blared. Fans poured in, wearing team caps and shirts, and waving pennants they had been handed seemingly without regard to allegiance.
In the days prior, I’d tried to learn the basics of the game via Google research. It was like trying to cram a new foreign language. It was dizzying trying to figure it out, and most of what I learned I quickly forgot. I decided it was like baseball, of which cricket is an ancestor. To the novice, it’s far easier to begin to learn by watching than by doing research.
I sat behind a Black couple who were discussing the upcoming match. Once the match began, I was utterly lost, so I asked them to explain to me what was happening. The man turned out to be a native of the Caribbean and happily obliged.
He told me with some pride that cricket is the second most popular sport in the world after soccer. I didn’t believe him. But, for once, I kept my opinion to myself. I would later confirm what he said was true. Yet another reason to keep one's mouth shut about things one doesn't know. There are roughly 3.5 billion soccer fans worldwide, followed by cricket with 2.5 billion.
Texas Super Chiefs-S.F. Unicorns match
As I began to gain a modicum of understanding about what was going on in the game, it became more and more interesting, and more and more fun even though the scoring remained utterly incomprehensible.
At one point, a batsman hit the ball sharply and the two runners raced back and forth between the wickets. A fielder got to the ball and threw the ball in toward one wicket. The fielder by one of the wickets caught it just before one of the batsmen arrived.
“Is the runner out?” I cried out.
My neighbor looked at me with a thin, crooked smile.
“The ball didn’t hit the wicket,” he said. “You have to hit the wicket in cricket.”
As he turned back to the game, he added, “This isn’t baseball.”
An Indian man seated beside me overheard and snickered.
Cricket traces its early origins to 16th century Britain. From cricket came a variation of the game called rounders, which is widely credited with being the more direct antecedent to what would become baseball.
For a while, in the 19th century, cricket and baseball co-existed. But by the turn of the 20th century, as someone put it, it was either cricket or baseball. Baseball became the national pastime. Cricket in America all but disappeared.
In recent years, there has been a surge of immigration to the U.S. from India, which just happens to be the largest country where cricket is popular. More than popular actually, fanatical. Television viewership of cricket matches in India exceeds 400 million.
Today, there are 4.8 million native-born Indians in America and sizable populations of Pakistanis and people from the Caribbean islands, all places where cricket is popular.
The growth of these populations is part of what spurred the creation of the Major Cricket League.
The six metropolitan areas with MLC teams are New York, Washington, D.C., Dallas, Seattle, Los Angeles and San Francisco, all of which have a sizable and growing number of South Asians.
“The arrival of T-20 in the United States was perhaps inevitable, given the country’s increasing population of immigrants from cricket-mad India, Pakistan and the Caribbean,” according to the Washington Post.
Fans at Super Chiefs-Unicorns match
Four of the American cricket teams are owned by the owners of Indian Premier League teams, the other two by Australian cricket clubs. The teams have 19 players. Each can have a maximum of nine foreign players and must have a minimum of 10 from the U.S.
The league seems determined to follow the business model captured by the Field of Dreams concept of “build it and they will come.”
“We’re trying to build infrastructure, a minor league, a major league, get a national team competitive all at the same time,” said Justin Geale, a director of operations for the MLC tournament, in the British newspaper, The Guardian. “That’s an awful lot going on and it’s going to take time. But I think our growth trajectory can be quick … once people see, ‘Hey, this is a great product. This is going to work.'"
The MCL was funded by an initial injection of $120 million and has the backing of some very wealthy individuals such as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who owns a piece of the Seattle team. But some observers say the new league may be doomed to be a small, niche sport unless it can seed interest at the grassroots level.
“MLC has failed to cater to the sporting culture of the U.S. or cultivate organic support from the general public,” said former ESPN cricket writer, Peter Della Penna, according to NPR. “Instead of bringing in international stars that no Americans know about, cricket should rather be introduced as a high school league sport which would create a pathway for it to be a NCAA Division I scholarship sport.”
Cricket batsmen. Photo credit: Jon Pinder
I went to see the cricket match in North Carolina out of curiosity. As a baseball fan, I have long wanted to know more about the ancient game from which it evolved. That curiosity was further stoked years ago when I would sometimes pass Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx on Sundays when matches were played on an open expanse of grass along upper Broadway, the players resplendent in all white. More recently, on a visit to Kathmandu, Nepal, I stopped to watch two kids intently playing sandlot cricket on a dusty, rocky patch of dirt. These experiences kindled a desire to learn more.
The challenge cricket faces in America is that it’s new (as in, therefore "weird"), it’s difficult to grasp and, in a country where the collective attention span is roughly that of a gnat, it’s slow, which is a major complaint about baseball and people at least know the game of baseball.
Robin Williams once called cricket “baseball on Valium.” Ouch! (Then again, he was probably referring to the days-long version of cricket.)
Morrisville, N.C.
The late Trinidadian historian and intellectual C.L.R. James wrote a book, Beyond A Boundary, about cricket (and much more) that many consider one of the classics of English-language literary sports writing. His descriptions of the game and some of the great players he saw are practically poetic, even if some of it is often baffling to someone who doesn't know the sport.
James lived in the U.S. for a number of years and came to know and like baseball. Sportswriter Robert Lipsyte noted in his introduction to an edition of James’s book, “He enjoyed the techniques of baseball, the game between the lines, but not the heckling of the crowd, the disputes, what he perceived as poor sportsmanship.” It makes me wonder if he went to any games at Yankee Stadium.
“He introduced makeshift cricket to some (American) friends and was bemused by the noisy, helter-skelter game they created. He attributed it to ‘differences of national character and outlook’ and was not concerned,” Lipsyte wrote.
I suspect cricket may never be a good fit for broad American sensibilities. The disputes and noise of fandom that James noted are part of the fun. But I’d be happy to be proven wrong. I could even appreciate the athleticism and energy on display in the match I saw. When a Texas fielder went racing to make a diving two-handed (bare-handed!) grab, I found myself leaping to my feet and yelling out in excitement. Maybe it will just take time and an openness to something new and different.
Next year, the United States will co-host, along with the West Indies, the cricket World Cup. That event could penetrate the consciousness of at least some American sports fans and perhaps seed interest. It’s hard to imagine now, but it wasn’t so long ago that professional basketball and football were minor sports. Soccer was practically unknown in the U.S. 50 years ago. Boxing and horse racing once enjoyed huge followings. Things do change.
American confused about cricket? Read Tom Melville's book Cricket For Americans.
Written by an American for Americans.
Ron! Why did they play in North Carolina, home to NONE of the teams? Just curious