OOn a summer evening in Centerville, Ohio, in 2010, a scattered group of club cricketers gathered for their regular Wednesday practice session at Stubbs Park. One of them had brought a new recruit, his 19-year-old nephew Ali Khan, who had only recently arrived from his village in Attock, Pakistan. Khan had only played with a tape ball, but after his first over with a real ball, all the other players stopped to watch his second. “Everyone,” Khan recalls, “was like, ‘Wait, who is this kid? Where did he come from again?’” That same weekend they named him to the first team.
More than a decade later, Khan, now 33, has just completed the second of three matches against Bangladesh on the Prairie View ground in Houston, a warm-up series for the World Cup. The US were one clean sheet up and one win away from their first-ever series victory against a Test nation, but the match went away from them. Bangladesh needed just 21 runs off the last 18 balls. They had four wickets left, and one of them was Shakib Al Hasan, one of the world’s best all-round cricketers, who was 30 and had less than 22 balls.
Khan’s first ball back bowled Shakib off his inside edge. His fourth was a yorker, which the new batsman trapped lbw. And his 10th, delivered in the final over, was sidestepped and caught by the wicketkeeper. The three wickets cost 11 runs, of which only eight were immediate. USA won the game by six points. “It was a big achievement to beat a T20 side from the top 10,” said Khan two days later. But he believes even bigger ones are in store. The actual tournament starts this Saturday with their opening game against Canada in Grand Prairie.
“I’m so excited for this World Cup,” said Khan. “I believe we are capable of taking down any side. We have four games in our first round and we are looking forward to playing them all.”
Whatever Khan came to the US for, it wasn’t cricket: “I didn’t even know cricket existed in the US,” he says. But soon after that first goal in Dayton, he was playing around the Midwest, traveling wherever he could get a good game. “My friend Farhan and I used to drive from Ohio to Chicago to play weekend games, 40 overs, we would drive five hours, stay overnight, play the game, then drive straight back because we had to work the next day.”
At the time he earned a living as a mobile phone salesman. Nowadays he does it by playing cricket. He was spotted by Courtney Walsh in 2015 and won a spot with the Guyana Amazon Warriors in the Caribbean Premier League. He had a rough few years with injuries, but was spotted again by Dwayne Bravo while they were both playing in Canada, and got a second chance in the CPL with the Trinbago Knight Riders. He did well enough to earn a shot in the domestic leagues of Bangladesh and Pakistan, and eventually the Indian Premier League.
He doesn’t get to play as much club cricket with the boys in Dayton anymore. “The problem is they play in parks, you know, so the grass is long and you can’t wear spikes or have a full run-up. As a bowler it’s a bit of a struggle. There is a lot of talent in the US, but in terms of facilities they are not that great at the moment.” However, he is very fond of this American team, which consists largely of men who, like him, moved to the United States to start over.
The team has more talent and experience than you would expect. There are a few who were part of the Indian Under-19 World Cup team in 2010, and a few more with some IPL experience; two who played a fair amount of first-class cricket in South Africa before moving, another who played under-19 cricket for Pakistan, former New Zealand Test player Corey Anderson, and Canada’s long-time captain Nitish Kumar. They all have their own stories of how they got here, playing for the USA, some came because their parents wanted a better life, some to study, some for the money.
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Khan sends some of his earnings back to his old village of Jafar, in Pakistan, where he dreams of one day building a new cricket ground.
Cricket may not be an American sport, but the team has many American stories.
“I mean, that’s why it’s called the land of opportunity,” says Khan. “You know, people come here from all over the world looking for different opportunities, and we all came here to play cricket. We never thought that, but here we are. And that’s what makes this team special too, because we’re bringing together all these different nationalities, different cultures and different backgrounds into one unit to play in this tournament, and that’s pretty special.