EASTMEADOW, NY — A towering 34,000-seat stadium with a precision-trimmed field of soft Kentucky bluegrass is rising in a suburban New York park that will host one of the world’s top cricket tournaments next month.
But on a recent Saturday morning, across Long Island’s Eisenhower Park, budding young cricketers were already busy batting, bowling and fielding on a makeshift field.
The T20 World Cup will be the first major international cricket competition in the US, but the age-old English game has thrived for years in the far reaches of metropolitan New York, fueled by steady waves of South Asian and Caribbean immigration. Every spring, parks from the Bronx and Queens to Long Island and New Jersey come alive with recreational leagues hosting weekend competitions.
US cricket organizers hope the June competition will take the sport’s popularity to new levels and provide for generations and cultures the lasting boost that football enjoyed when the US hosted the first FIFA World Cup in 1994. On Wednesday, retired Olympic sprinter Usain Bolt, an honorary ambassador of the T20 World Cup, visited the nearly complete Eisenhower Stadium, along with members of the U.S. cricket team and former New York soccer and basketball greats.
Parmanand Sarju, founder of the Long Island Youth Cricket Academy where Saturday’s training took place, said he is “extremely happy” to see the new stadium rising on top of the ball field where his youth academy started, a sign of how far things have come came.
“When we started over a decade ago, there was no understanding of cricket, at least at youth level,” says the Merrick resident, who founded the academy to teach his two American-born children the sport he played in Guyana. in South America. “Now they are building a stadium here.”
The sport originally took root in the suburbs of New York City, but has gradually spread as immigrant families, like generations before, moved to the suburbs, transforming communities, said Ahmad Chohan, a Pakistani resident and chairman of the New York City Police Department. York. cricket club, which also plays in Eisenhower as part of a national league with approximately 70 teams.
According to him, the World Cup is a ‘historic moment’.
Cricket is the most watched sport in the world after football — India star Virat Kohli has 268 million Instagram followers — but is only played by more than 200,000 Americans nationwide in more than 400 local leagues, according to USA Cricket, which monitors on sports. men’s national cricket team.
Major League Cricket launched in the US last year with six professional T20 teams, including a New York franchise that is tentatively playing some matches at a stadium in the Dallas area that also hosts World Cup matches.
USA Cricket chairman Venu Pisike believes the T20 World Cup – the first time the US has participated in the tournament – will mark a turning point.
The sport is among those scheduled for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles – the first time in more than a century, he noted. The International Cricket Council, the sport’s governing body, has also committed to growing the U.S. market.
“Cricket is mainly seen as an expat sport, but things will look very different in the next 10 to 20 years,” says Pisike. “Americans will certainly change their mindset and approach when it comes to the development of cricket.”
Both the matches in Los Angeles and the upcoming World Cup, which the US is co-hosting with the West Indies, will feature a modern variation of the game known as ‘Twenty20’, which lasts around three hours and is highlighted by aggressive batters swinging away for homerun-like ‘sixes’. It is considered more accessible to casual fans than traditional formats, which can last from one to five days, while hitters typically take a more cautious approach. Twenty20 is the format used in the hugely popular Indian Premier League.
Eisenhower Park will host half the matches played in the US, including a headline clash between cricket titans Pakistan and India on June 9.
Other matches in the 55-match, 20-nation tournament that starts on June 1 will be played on existing cricket grounds in Texas and Florida. Later rounds will take place in Antigua, Trinidad and other Caribbean countries, with the final in Barbados on June 29.
Cricket has a long history, especially in the US and New York.
The sport was played by American troops during the Revolutionary War, and the first international match was held in Manhattan in 1844 between St. George’s Cricket Club and Canada, according to Stephen Holroyd, a Philadelphia cricket historian.
Even in 1855, New York newspapers still paid more attention to cricket than baseball, but the sport remained stubbornly isolated, with all-Britain cricket clubs hindering its growth just as baseball was taking off, he said.
By the end of World War I, cricket had largely disappeared – until immigrants from India and other former British colonies helped revive it about half a century later.
Anubhav Chopra, co-founder of the Long Island Premier League, a nearly 15-year-old men’s league that plays at another local park, is among the more than 700,000 Indian Americans in the New York City area — by far the largest community of its kind in the country.
The Babylon resident has never been to a professional cricket match but has tried to share his love for the game he played growing up in New Delhi with his three American children, including his 9-year-old son who takes cricket lessons.
Chopra has bought tickets for all nine matches taking place in Eisenhower and is taking his wife, children and grandparents to the Sri Lanka-South Africa match on June 3.
“For me, cricket is life,” he said. “This is a unique opportunity.”
The dense latticework of metal bars and wooden slabs that make up Eisenhower’s modular stadium will come down shortly after the end of the cup matches, but the cricket pitch will remain, minus the rectangular area in the center known as the pitch.
Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman said what remains will provide a “world-class” base for local cricket teams – and perhaps a future home for a professional team.
___
Follow Philip Marcelo on twitter.com/philmarcelo.