T20 world cup 2024 in USA-Caribbean is about location, relocation, and revival. For the US, it’s their biggest attempt in trying to locate themselves in the cricketing world map. For some players and for smaller associate countries, it’s about revival of a dream at the biggest stage.
The year before, the last squares of a baseball diamond were razed away at the local team ground in Dallas, Texas. The expanse that once overlooked the compound of the iconic aerospace firm, Vought, was home to Texas AirHogs that shut during the pandemic when debts mounted.
But from the ruins of a baseball stadium sprung a cricket venue, rechristened the Grand Prairie Stadium. In a year’s time, it became the home of Major League Franchise, Texas Super Kings, after a 20 million dollar redevelopment program. The baseball-to-cricket symbolism is complete when this Sunday it hosts the World Cup opener between the hosts and Canada, incidentally the oldest recorded international cricket game. A match between the two countries was played in 1844 at Bloomingdale Park in Manhattan, now submerged beneath the pillars of the fabled skyscrapers that pierce into the skyline.
Whereas the 19th century match is merely a quiz quirk, their latest encounter contains deeper meanings and consequences. It is cricket’s latest yet strongest attempt to realize the American Dream, to find a toehold in the largest sports market in the world.
It’s the month they have been waiting for a long time here. A streak of excitement rings in the voice of Ricky Singh, the owner of the Singh’s Sporting Store in New York. Ricky is from Guyana. His sports shop was the only one that supplied cricket goods in the city, home to hundreds of clubs, as old and regal as the Staten Island Cricket Club established in 1872 to the Stallions Club, formed by a group of taxi drivers in the Bronx in 2015.
“When I first landed in the city, I never thought the city would ever host a World Cup game, that I would watch a game in broad daylight in my neighbourhood. And an India-Pakistan game too. This is a dream,” says Ricky, whose first store was his home in the Bronx. Now he has two storefronts—one in the Bronx and another in Ozone Park. He says he doesn’t inflate the prices, though most are imported from India, Pakistan and England. “It’s not just because cricket is my passion, but because I want the game to grow in the country,” he says.
His neighborhood is predominantly Asian—and he asserts he knows every cricketer in the locale. As are most of the clubs—there are almost 1,100 registered clubs in the country, some 200,000 people playing across 400 local leagues, according to USA Cricket. One of them is Queens United Cricket Academy, which has players and coaches from all cricket-playing countries in South Asia, apart from the Caribbean and South Africa.
George Samuel, one of the coaches, too can’t believe that the World Cup has reached the shores of Long Island, a familiar shooting haunt of Martin Scorsese, and where a chunk of his blockbuster Irishman was shot. Samuel looked on with marvel at the stadium springing up from nowhere, after the board had to abort the early plan of building one at Van Cortlandt Park due to public resistance. “The stadium is just a stroll down the road from my home. I wouldn’t have believed this when someone told me that there would be a World Cup game next door. It would be a massive moment for us and the game in the country” he says.
So says Peter Jayasingham of Mavericks Club in Dallas. “When I came here from Kandy in Sri Lanka in the mid-80s, no one knew cricket here. There was no ground here. Now there are seven to eight. and all booked a few months in advance,” he says. The cricket field has expanded proportionately to the spurt in migrant population. According to estimates from the Census Bureau’s annual survey, there are around 1.9 million South Asian immigrants in Texas. “If at least 10 percent of them play cricket competitively, the USA could be a force, and could change the game in the country,” he says.
The tournament could be a game-changer, like the 1994 World Cup was to football. A Harris Poll survey showed only 18 percent knew the game at the time of the tournament; now as much 30 percent do. The love for the game didn’t catch fire instantly, it rather slow-burned. But soccer has captured the psyche of the Americans, beyond the usual group of immigrants from football-mad countries.
The coincidence is the launch of Major League Cricket, just as the Major League Soccer was relaunched in 1993, as part of the bid to host the tournament. Just as soccer saw multibillion investments from Europe, so has cricket last year with MLC with an initial investment to the tune of 200 millions dollars with a host of successful and rich techie czars investing, among them Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO and Adobe counterpart Shantanu Narayen.
There is optimism of the sport cracking the American code. Or would it crumble like several other American dreams? “This World Cup has a great format, with true global participation. It will be very appreciated by the large US cricket community,” says John O’Neill, who wrote Netherland, a gripping novel in the backdrop of 9/11 with a cricket-loving Trinidadian as its protagonist.
He chimes in a note of caution: “Will it spark cricket to life in the USA? I’m not so sure. The grassroots of the game needs more sustained investment to make that happen. Yeah, a little bit of World Cup helps, a little bit of MLC too would, but in the end for the game to succeed, it has to become a culture,” the author says.
That would be cricket’s greatest barrier.
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The first American president, George Washington, played a form of cricket called Wicket, wrote first lieutenant George Ewing in his diary. “This day His Excellency dined with General Nox and after dinner did us the honor to play at Wicket with us.” Abraham Lincoln reportedly turned out to watch Chicago play Milwaukee in 1849. In his time, cricket was played in 22 states, across 1000 clubs.
The decline, the historians state, began after the Civil War. Thereafter, baseball gushed into their consciousness. Several theories whirl, among the most fascinating being the discovery of its ideals. “Actually, cricket was doomed in this country regardless of England’s actions in the Civil War. The pace was too slow and, more importantly, the requirements for field maintenance were too fastidious for it to be played by soldiers forever on the move,” wrote baseball historian John Thorn in an essay for The Medium.
He added: “What America did to cricket was what it does to all exogenous innovation — repackage it to suit its own tastes. Baseball borrowed much of cricket’s nomenclature, its copious record-keeping, its style of play and, most significantly, its emblematic relation to its nation of origin.”
Or rather, cricket couldn’t establish the American character at a time when the nation was building. Baseball, on the other hand, could. It survived the Great Depression, it outlasted the two wars. Cricket just wilted and sequestered into the cave.
When it reemerged, it became the game of immigrants. Says Jamie Harrison, a history teacher and a former coach of the Maryland Youth Cricket. “It is a sport now almost entirely played by South Asians and Caribbeans. There is little integration, it’s sort of a community sport for them, a weekend get-together where they could create a hometown in a cricket park. It’s a good thing, but for the game to grow, you need integration,” he says.
In 2008, Harrison set up the first American high school cricket team outside of New York City. “It was created by a group of American kids who, without ever having played a hardball game, had already fallen in love with the sport,” he says. It happened during a two-day visit to Civil War sites in Richmond.
There, they stumbled onto cricket writer Tom Melville, the author of Cricket For Americans and The Tented Field: A History of Cricket in America. “He gave them a bat, a tennis ball and bowled underarm. In half an hour, they were smitten by the game,” he says. A team was soon formed, they began to play with the leather ball, yet their initiatives died a slow death and the team was disbanded. “There was no support from the United States cricket association,” he says, and puts it eloquently: “Those on the top were happy being kings sitting on a pile of dirt rather than becoming princes on a beautiful mountain.”
Being so tightly knit to a sole ethnic subculture has, thus, blocked and locked the country’s cricket into a pattern of cultural isolation. “I think they are content doing that,” says O’Neill, adding, “you know our association is known for its dysfunction.”
The USA Cricket Association, the former cricket-governing body, was suspended thrice in as many years before its eventual dismantling in 2016. Their reign was so incompetent that the body was running a debt of four million dollars.
Maybe, cricket’s biggest obstacle is cricket itself, inhabiting its ivory tower, surviving as a niche sport, content in not entering the ring of five major league sports: the big three of football, baseball and basketball, followed by hockey and soccer. “Maybe, the administrators are afraid of Americans changing the nature of the game, as it did with baseball long ago,” says Harrison. “But if you look at American history, be it politics or sports or artistic pursuit, only the ambitious thrive. Cricket in the country needs that.” The ambition, in a sense, is that American character, and the essence of the American Dream.
Regardless, cricket’s American Dream rages on, like the faceless immigrant populace that fuels it and strives to fulfill their own. Cricket would believe that it could erect more stadiums on the grave of baseball diamonds. But it’s a dream, and not a promise.