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.
Related: New York will host the match between India and Pakistan in the 2024 T20 World Cup
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.
Related: ‘They’re big, bad bullies’: New York’s bitter fight over a 34,000-seat cricket stadium
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 executive at Amazon. They have credibility, competence, capital and connections. English cricket now faces serious competition in the summer months.
“When I realized 10 years ago that the T20 format is here to stay, I felt for the first time that there was an 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?”
Quote of the week
“Four-day cricket is often slow and turgid; it should be played over three days in my opinion with a minimum of 110 overs per day, to speed it up and give better value for money. All seventeen teams would have to play each other alternately at home and away, and to create incentives in the absence of a two-division format, ECB funds should be distributed based on where a team finishes in the rankings. Touring sides should be contractually obliged to play against the counties, as has always been the case, and test players should have to appear for their counties if they are not playing for England. All these factors can increase the appeal of the first-class game.”
Far be it from The Spin to suggest that Arron Banks, the self-proclaimed ‘bad boy of Brexit’, appears to be living in a dark and distant past, but given that three-day cricket was held there in 1988, there aren’t 17 counties since 1991 and we’ve had two divisions since 2000, his five-point plan for the first-class match certainly seems set in stone there. Other clever ideas are believed to include the use of uncovered pitches and the reintroduction of rest days in the middle of Test matches. Still, good luck to him as he tries to explain to the BCCI that the only way India will tour here is if they commit to playing a first-class match at Wantage Road.
Memory strip
Kevin Pietersen leaves the field at the Oval in May 2015 with an unbeaten 355 to his name against Leicestershire. Attempting to stage a comeback in England with red-ball runs for Surrey, the 34-year-old was informed by Andrew Strauss the previous day that he would not be eligible for the Ashes series due to “a huge trust issue between him and the ECB. ”. Pietersen would play his last first-class match a few weeks later and his last T20 in 2018. His England career never revived after the Ashes whitewash of 2013/14.
Do you want more?
Ali Martin talks to outgoing Professional Cricketers’ Association president Rob Lynch about the state of the game.
Angus Fontaine takes charge of the final season of The Test, which pulled back the curtain on Australia’s tour of England last year.
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