So the US is hosting a Cricket World Cup? The game that lasts five days, where they stop for sandwiches and cups of tea, and sometimes doesn’t even have a winner? Yeah, sort of. But you are talking about Test cricket, for which there is no World Cup, but there is in the form of the World Test Championship.
Understood. So this is the game that takes a whole day to play, even if you do, thankfully usual get a winner? Yeah, sort of. But you’re talking about it one-day cricket, which is played over the course of, appropriately, a day. That has its own World Cupwhich takes place every four years, and the next in 2027.
So what is this World Cup then? And is there tea and sandwiches involved? In the early 2000s, cricket was at the forefront for the first time in its history. In a similar way to baseball in recent years, cricket administrators began to fear that young people did not have the patience to sit through longer matches without wandering off to do frivolous turn-of-the-millennium things like playing N64 or listening to 50. Cent (and this was for social media). The result was Twenty20, the shortest form of top-level cricket: games usually last around three hours rather than spanning several geological eras. And this upcoming World Cup is the Twenty20 World Cup (actually marketed as the T20 World Cup by people who probably think The Kids are incapable of relating to words longer than three letters)
Did the plan work?Well, in a way. Anyone previously reluctant to play five days’ worth of cricket will be even less likely to do so if they can quickly master the sport and still get home in time for an N64 session before bed. That led to the demise of Test cricket, one of the finest products of the British Empire. But since the British Empire also brought about massive exploitation of countries and people around the world, people might not be so sad to see its popularity decline. T20, meanwhile, has grown tremendously, especially in India, where the Indian Premier League generated more than $1 billion in revenue last year (it’s the 13th most lucrative sporting league in the world and growing rapidly). Critics of T20 say players – who need to score runs as quickly as possible – have traded subtlety and craft for power, in the same way that smallball gave way to a home run explosion in baseball. T20 defenders say it used to be less exciting to watch chubby men feebly push a ball across a field for days on end.
So if cricket is associated with the British empire, why is the T20 World Cup in the US this year? I thought we were going to end this in 1776? Well, it actually is co-hosted by the US, along with the West Indies (a confederation of a dozen Caribbean countries competing as one team in cricket). And why – well, America has a lot of money and if local leagues can attract foreign superstars on short-term contracts, TV rights can be sold to the huge market in India. Whether that’s possible is debatable: various ‘foreign’ sports, from rugby union and rugby league to something called ‘soccer’, have tried to access the lucrative US sports markets over the years, with varying degrees of success.
But cricket has roots in the US: there are reports of matches being played in America as early as 1751, and Philadelphia was a hotbed of the game until baseball swallowed the country. And while it’s unlikely that MLB and NFL fans will convert to cricket en masse, the foundations are solid. There are hundreds of thousands of American residents and citizens who grew up with the game in countries like India, Pakistan, Australia, Bangladesh, England and Jamaica. And many of them passed on their love of the game to their US-born children.
Where will it be played? Most matches, including the semi-finals and the final, will be played in the West Indies. But the US locations – in Grand Prairie, Texas; Lauderhill, FL; and East Meadow, New York – will host a total of 16 games. Perhaps the most intriguing will be India vs. Pakistan on Long Island: Think Yankees vs. Red Sox with added geopolitical tensions. Good luck getting tickets: the cheapest ones sell for $850 on resale sites. However, tickets are available at more reasonable prices for most other games.
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Who is going to win? Usual suspects like India, Australia, West Indies and England are among the betting favourites, but the team with the best winning percentage in the T20 World Cup is… Nepal?! That said, they have only competed in the tournament once before – in 2014 – and won two of their three matches, finishing second in their group and failing to progress. So maybe don’t bet your house/family/dog on it.
And the US? They’re actually not that bad! Many of their players grew up in countries where traditional cricket is played before switching their allegiance to the US, but they have recently achieved solid results, including wins over Canada, who they will play in the tournament opener, and Bangladesh, who are ranked number 9 in the world.