USA v Canada: T20 Cricket World Cup 2024 opener – live

The teams

The US wins the toss and bowl

Valley Ranch is as much America as any other corner of the country, and the young Americans here love it as much as the kids in other neighborhoods love basketball, baseball or whatever other game everyone will be watching this weekend.

So about that game in 1844

They all have their own story about how they got here, playing for the US. Some came because their parents wanted a better life, others to study, some for the money. Ali Khan sends some of his earnings back to his old village of Jafar, Pakistan, where he dreams of one day building a new cricket ground.

What’s next on this list: Johannesburg, Lord’s, Guyana, Hambantota, Dhaka, Nagpur, Abu Dhabi, Sydney. The answer, of course, is Dallas, which hosts the opening match of the eight T20 World Cups to date.

Until recently, the idea of ​​a Cricket World Cup starting in America would have them rolling down the aisles, but before 1994 the same was true of football.

Tonight’s opening match between the US and Canada is a step into the future And Past. USA v Canada is the oldest cricket match of them all, dating back to 1844, a fact we know because it has been quoted to within an inch of its life in the build-up to this game. And while the future is not up to us, there has never been a greater push to make cricket a small but stable part of American life.

Major League Cricket is growing fast, the US is co-hosting a World Cup – and they have a team that may surprise a lot of people in the coming weeks. They beat Bangladesh 2-1 in a warm-up series, and their team is a handy mix of naturalized players like Corey Anderson and homegrown talents like Steven Taylor.

They also have Nitish Kumar, who played 18 T20 internationals for Canada between 2012 and 2019 before moving to the US and eventually qualifying to play for them. That adds some spice to the already spicy rivalry, as does the fact that the brilliant Sri Lankan Pubudu Dassanayake, once the American coach, now does the same job for Canada.

Tonight’s winner has an outside chance of qualifying from a group that also includes India, Pakistan and Ireland. But such a competition exists in itself: as a competition and as an event.

Rob will be here soon. In the meantime, here’s Andy Bull on the status of cricket in the US:

Manhattan’s skyscrapers are built on cricket fields. There was one under Pier 17 at the Seaport on the East River, another under Central Park’s North Meadow, and a third to the right at 1st Avenue and East 32nd St, under the parking lot of NYU’s Langone Medical Center.

In 1844, a crowd of about 5,000 New Yorkers watched the first international match there, between the U.S. and Canada. “Cricket was the first modern team sport in America,” says Chuck Ramkissoon in Joseph O’Neill’s great New York novel Netherland, “a bona fide American pastime.” He is right. It once was.

By the mid-1800s, there were dozens, even hundreds, of clubs in the US. Historians have never settled on a single reason why cricket died there. The Civil War was one factor. “Up to that time we had a large number of good young men playing the game, and then the fever of war took over,” one player wrote in the American Cricketer in the early 20th century.

Baseball was an easier game for the soldiers to pick up and play because it did not require a rolled wicket, specialized coaching or equipment. When they made it professional in 1869, it was packaged and sold as the Native American sport. The Patriots Game.

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