If you’re a cricket fan living in the United States, this might be the best sentence you’ve read in a long time: “A national cricket team that most Americans didn’t even know they had beat one of the sport’s global powers, Pakistan, for whom the game is a national obsession.”
That line, courtesy of CNN.com, sums up what happened June 6 in a group stage round of one of cricket’s biggest global events, the T20 World Cup — co-hosted by the United States and the West Indies. The U.S.-Pakistan match took place in a former minor-league ballpark in Grand Prairie, Texas, and the Americans play part time for the team while also working day jobs. Most of them, according to NBCNews.com, are of South Asian or Caribbean descent, and some of them previously played in India or the West Indies.
“It’s probably shocked the cricketing world,” Corey Anderson, a 33-year-old player on the American team, told CNN.com. “I know definitely here in the U.S., it’s been a lot of media coverage, which is fantastic. I think USA Cricket is just not that well known within America, and I think we put ourselves a little bit more on the map.”
But that’s not the only good news for the sport in the United States: Three day after the Americans stunned the 2022 T20 World Cup runner-up, more than 30,000 fans showed up at the Nassau County International Cricket Stadium, a temporary venue built for $30 million in a Long Island, N.Y. park, on June 9 to watch India play Pakistan. News outlets reported that the cheapest tickets were going for more than $700, with premium seats selling for up to $10,000 each.
“India vs. Pakistan is like the Super Bowl on steroids. We had no idea how huge it was,” Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman told Reuters ahead of the match. “We want to put our best foot forward.”
Organized by the Dubai-based International Cricket Council (ICC), the T20 tournament began in 2007 and typically is played every two years. This is the first time the event has been played in the United States, with three venues hosting a total of 16 matches — including the Nassau County International Cricket Stadium, Grand Prairie Stadium and Central Broward Park in Lauderhill, Fla. Co-hosting this year’s tournament gave the U.S. an automatic berth — a move that the ICC hopes will spur American interest in the sport.
USA Cricket, based in Dallas, defines itself as “an organization in development that seeks to unify the United States-based cricket community.” But Al Jazeera — a news organization covering the Arab world and funded in part by the Qatari government — pointed out that USA Cricket has often been in disarray.
“ICC’s game development program, Playground to Podium, aims to reach one million children — half of them female — by the 2028 LA Olympics, and regional development manager for the Americas, Fara Gorsi, is confident of success,” according to Al Jazeera.
“By the time we reach the LA Games it will be flourishing in all three cities [Long Island, Grand Prairie and Lauderhill] as a minimum,” Gorsi said. “And [it] will create a framework that will then be deployed across the States. If we want to see a different community grow cricket in the USA, it has to come organically through schools, through new leaders, new communities, parents, teachers.”
“Cricket faces huge barriers to becoming anything more than a curiosity to most Americans,” CNN.com added, while also noting the country’s changing demographics. “Cricket’s new Field of Dreams in Nassau County is testimony to a dynamic and highly educated South Asian community that is becoming increasingly prosperous and connected in U.S. business and society and politically more important.”
“The diaspora is sizable, and they clearly have connections to [India] … the most populous nation in the world,” Simon Chadwick, a professor specializing in the geopolitical economy of sport at the France-based SKEMA Business School. “You’ve got a large diaspora, a large country. You’ve got a sport that has proved to be commercially incredibly successful. You got have investors, not just from the United States or from the Gulf region, hungry for potential commercial opportunities and willing to take a punt.”
The U.S. went on to lose T20 matches to India and South Africa, with matches scheduled against co-host West Indies on June 21 and England on June 24. The tournament’s final is slated for June 29 at Kensington Oval in Bridgetown, Barbados.
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