by On Monday something unexpected happened in downtown Manhattan. The Empire State Building, long an architectural symbol of American life, was illuminated in blue and red, the colors of the International Cricket Council. Chris Gayle, the former West Indies international, was a cricketer known for his ability to hit sixes, flicking the switch to improve the lighting.
“Big Apple, take a bite,” Gayle said The Telegraph of his involvement. “Cricket is coming. America, are you ready?”
If it seems like the most unlikely of sports evangelism, akin to Extinction Rebellion trying to sign up the BP board as new members, Gayle is not entirely pessimistic in her insistence that the USA is the new frontier for cricket. There was a New York light show to celebrate the fact that on June 9, India will play Pakistan in a T20 World Cup match in a new cricket stadium built in the city. All 34,000 tickets for the game have long been sold. And that could be the beginning.
“The appetite is definitely there,” says Liam Plunkett, a former England international who lives with his American wife in Philadelphia. “More kids in Houston play cricket than they play baseball. Every weekend I can go and find a hundred cricket matches in my area. Academies are popping up left, right and centre.
“Even if they don’t play themselves, every American I know has seen a game going on at their local park. It’s here.”
It sure is: the redevelopment of the former Texas AirHogs baseball stadium in Grande Prairie into a Major League Cricket (MLC) stadium in 2021, and will serve as the base for the US National Teams.
In the past, even as recently as 20 years ago, the idea that cricket would make inroads into the American sporting landscape would have been viewed as delusional. This was, after all, a sport long dismissed as an appendage of British colonialism.
Back in the Victorian era, when games were first codified, in the United States it was a matter of cultural pride not to condone the activities of the former imperial master. Gridiron was conceived as a local version of rugby and football. And baseball was the all-American choice of cricket. Never mind that the rest of the world adopted the British models, and in the United States it was the future. Cricket affairs were made fun of especially when Britain’s strange obsession, a reflection of the class system, was competing over days, often without a proper conclusion. That is if it was thought about at all.
But times – and especially demographics – change. Although America may have sneered, in other parts of the empire, cricket was absorbed cheerfully. In the Indian subcontinent it grew into a national obsession. The Indian Premier League (IPL), the annual two-month long tournament of the world’s best players, has become one of the most lucrative sports franchises in the world. And, in the same way that British travelers brought their sports around the world in the 1800s, so more recently the South Asian diaspora have taken their love of the game with them and taken jobs in medical and technology firms. America. Hundreds of thousands of Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and Bangladeshis have come to the US in recent years, bats tucked under their arms.
Ali Khan is one of them. When he was 19, his family moved from Pakistan to Dayton, Ohio, where his uncle worked in IT. A more than useful player in his teens, he considers that his entire childhood was spent playing the game on the streets of Attock in Punjab. There was no chance, in his opinion, of doing that now that he had moved to the USA.
“My cricket dreams were pretty much over,” he recalls. “I came thinking there was no way to play in America. I soon found out how wrong I was.”
Within days of his arrival, his uncle had told him about the Dayton cricket club. This was a social gathering formed largely as an opportunity for South Asians to come together and bond, a hint of home in a foreign land. Khan went so far as to try and scared the living lights out of everyone there with his bowling pace. A few months later, he saw on Facebook that a competition was being organized in Florida. He found himself invited and took four wickets in the quarter final. By 2015, he was selected to play in tournaments in the Caribbean and made his debut for the USA cricket team the following year.
“It was made up of expats,” he says of the national side, where he played against countries such as Oman, Canada and the UAE. “Mostly Indians, but also others from the Caribbean, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. As well as a few players who were born here, children of immigrants who loved the game from their parents.”
These days Khan is a full-time professional cricketer, playing in T20 leagues around the world. He became the first US international to buy an IPL franchise. Then last summer he played in the first season of MLC, the new US-based tournament designed to copy IPL methodology. Loud, boisterous, colorful and above all fast, his own purpose throws away many of the prejudices the American sporting community has about cricket.
“We played every game in front of packed houses,” says Khan, who these days lives in Houston, now the epicenter of the American game. “What I’ve noticed recently is that when I told people I played cricket, they said, ‘What’s that?’ Now [when] I say I play cricket, they say, ‘Oh, nice’. I say, ‘How do you know that?’ They say they saw it on social media. Sometimes it comes on your screen even if you’re not interested.”
In fact, played by a community that is the backbone of America’s IT business, the game’s social media presence is almost as noisy as an IPL team shirt. And with that increased awareness has come financial investment. Last year’s MLC was played in two venues: Dallas and Morrisville, North Carolina. This year’s iteration will be played in six purpose-built stadiums across the country, including the New York facility that will host the T20 World Cup match. And then there are the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, which will include cricket for the first time. A team from the USA will compete there, just as they will in the upcoming T20 World Cup.
“I think these tournaments will do for cricket what it is [the USA hosting] did the World Cup in football in the 90s,” says Plunkett, who is signed up to play in the MLC in July. “These days you come into Philly and you see more soccer fields than American football or baseball. I think cricket could develop like that.
“Locally, I don’t think people realize how big cricket is. I tell them if you had one of America’s greatest athletes standing here next to Virat Kohli [the Indian team captain]there would be a bigger queue for Virat Kohli.”
Not everyone is enthralled by the rapid growth of the migrant game. Back in 2009 in Loudoun County, Virginia, a semi-rural suburb south of Washington, there were only five teams playing cricket in the area. Now, with the huge influx of South Asians recruited into local tech businesses, there are 60 clubs and more than 3,000 players. With only five pitches in the county, the local league received planning permission to build a number of wickets, training space and an associated car park on the site of an underused basketball facility at Mackie Gordon Park. But here’s the thing: the field is named after a pioneering coach in a local black baseball informal league. Through online petitions, placards on lawns and loud community meetings, the locals are resisting the new use of the place, not wanting to destroy its heritage.
“It’s not fair to our community to completely change the nature, character and amenities here,” said local mayor Bridge Lyttleton. Washingtonian.
This is a culture war fought around a set of three wooden stumps. But it is a war in which it seems that there will be only one winner.
“In terms of development, we’re still at ground zero,” says Plunkett. “But everything is happening so fast. We are taking the game into the schools. And once it’s there, once kids and their parents can see a pipeline into a proper professional sport, there’s no stopping it. Cricket is the future.”
