The Spin | ‘Land of opportunity’: USA is cricket’s bold new frontier once again

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.

There were places where they continued to play cricket, especially around Philadelphia, but even that scene disappeared during the First World War.

That made Netherlands a difficult novel to sell. “When I was writing it, people asked, ‘What’s it about?’” O’Neill says. “I said, ‘It’s about cricket in New York,’ and people didn’t know what to say back. It didn’t sound very promising.”

O’Neill played himself. “When I first arrived in New York in 1998, it was a matter of driving around and spotting people playing cricket, stopping and asking them, ‘Can I play?’”

There has always been more cricket in the suburbs than anyone but the players knew. “It’s a very different cricket culture,” says O’Neill. “The people who love cricket here are often the ones who drive taxis all night.”

Everyone I speak to in American cricket seems to be chasing some dream, even if it’s just a weekend away to play the game they loved in the home they left behind. “There’s a reason why they call it the land of opportunity,” says Ali Khan.

He was a teenage tapeball player when his family moved from Pakistan in 2010. He assumed he would have to give up cricket because he didn’t think they played it in the US until his uncle took him to their local club in Dayton. Ohio. That same weekend he played his first real match. Now he will open the bowling for the national team in the T20 World Cup.

Among dreamers, there have always been those who thought even bigger. O’Neill knew one and based the character of Ramkissoon on him. In the novel, Ramkissoon dreams of building a real stadium outside New York. ‘An arena for the best cricket teams in the world, twelve test matches a summer, watched by eight thousand spectators for fifty dollars each.’

There are others. I’ve met a few myself. I still have a box in the attic full of promotional flyers that Allen Stanford sent to the confused locals of Fort Collins, Colorado, the testing ground for his own attempt to break into US cricket. There was the Pro Cricket League, which started and ended in 2004 after an opening match was delayed 50 minutes because no one had stumps. The Cricket All-Stars series, led by Shane Warne and Sachin Tendulkar, reached three matches. “The US can be the cricket capital of the Western Hemisphere,” Don Lockerbie, the CEO of the old cricket association, used to say.

Ramkissoon’s stadium is finally here, a temporary building in Eisenhower Park, 30 miles outside the city. “A match between India and Pakistan in New York City?” he says in the book. “In a state-of-the-art arena with the Liberty Tower in the background?”

It’s finally happening. The match, on June 9, is one of the hottest tickets in sports in 2024.

American cricket is no longer a game for shift workers. The men who run it now leave behind long, lucrative careers in Silicon Valley. They launched Minor League Cricket in 2021, Major League Cricket in 2023 and they are still building. MLC’s investors include the CEO of India’s largest media conglomerate, the CEO of Microsoft, the former CEO of Adobe and the former technology director at Amazon. They have credibility, competence, capital and connections. English cricket now faces serious competition in the summer months.

“It was 10 years ago, when I realized that the T20 format is here to stay, that I first felt there was opportunity for this sport in this country,” said Soma Somasegar, co-owner of the MLC in Seattle. Orcas.

Growing up in Pondicherry, India, he fell in love with cricket listening to the commentary on his pocket radio. He moved to the US to study, rose to senior vice president at Microsoft and now runs a venture capital firm.

The Orcas have established an academy and are beginning work on a new stadium in Seattle. “The next time the World Cup comes to the U.S.,” he says, without adding an or or but, “we will host matches in Seattle.”

Somasegar also has a dream. “I think the only thing we can do is to make cricket a mainstream sport here,” he says. “Not just for the diaspora, but to see if we can break through in the coming decades and make cricket a major sport.”

He makes the comparison with football, which he believes was not taken seriously by anyone until after the 1994 World Cup in the US. “Now you can’t go to a park without seeing a bunch of kids kicking a football, right? Ask yourself, why can’t we see something similar in cricket?”

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