Everything points to something big. The world’s third-most-watched single sports event after the Soccer World Cup and the Super Bowl — the Cricket World Cup — is coming for the first time, this June, to the United States, the world’s largest and most lucrative sports market.
Event organizer and world cricket’s governing body, the International Cricket Council (ICC), has long eyed the United States as cricket’s great untapped frontier, the prize plum in the game’s dream of world expansion.
Cricket’s power brokers have high hopes their time has come with an ambitious 16-match schedule to be played in three designated American locations in Lauderhill (four matches at the Broward County Regional Cricket Stadium), Dallas and New York. The United States will co-host cricket’s most anticipated event of the year with lead host the West Indies, and the rest of the 40 matches in the opening round will take place in several locations in the Caribbean.
Will this be cricket’s best chance to finally crack the American sports market, to at long last lure into the fold the odd man out of what’s effectively the sport of the English-speaking world, wildly popular in all of Britain’s former colonies save one?
Historically, all this won’t so much be cricket’s coming out party in America as much as a calculated effort to reintroduce a sport that’s long vanished from its native habitat.
Introduced, in its present form by British immigrants as far back as the 1830s, cricket was present at the creation of America’s team sports in a then baseball/basketball/football-less country. With an estimated 1,000 cricket clubs active around the country by the time of the Civil War, supporters were justifiably confident their game was well on track to becoming America’s “national pastime.”
But, for reasons that are still hotly debated by scholars to this day, cricket didn’t play its cards right — “Went off in the wrong direction,” as the New York Times explained it in 1872. And that opened the door for an undeveloped folkgame called baseball to capture the nation’s sporting psyche.
Today, the British are long gone, but cricket still lives on as an ethnic enclave, a sport played and controlled almost exclusively by the country’s South Asian community, most from cricket-crazed India, who nurture their sporting heritage largely out of sight and sound of the rest of the country.
For those 6.5 million Americans of South Asian descent, cricket has prospered in recent years. The country’s first professional cricket league was launched last year in Dallas, playing to enthusiastic, but predominantly South Asian, crowds in a converted minor league baseball stadium. This was soon followed by the announcement that cricket would make its Olympic debut at the 2028 Los Angeles games.
Being so tightly tethered to a single ethnic subculture has, however, locked the country’s cricket into a pattern of cultural isolation rather than integration. The enthusiasm of its supporters hasn’t rubbed off on the rest of Americans, and expectations that cricket could follow soccer or pickleball’s path to widespread popularity have been frustratingly elusive in a land that’s been, for over five generations, hardwired to that other bat-and-ball game, baseball.
Prospects for this World Cup tournament kicking open the door to cricket’s popularity aren’t encouraging. The ICC has already decided to stage all of India’s group stage matches in the United States, complimented by matches from the other South Asian countries of Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal, as well as team USA, many of whose members also hail from South Asia. With the lucrative, emotionally charged, but demographically limited India-Pakistan match earmarked for New York, the ICC has all but confirmed it intends to aggressively target only that 3% of the American populace familiar with the game.
If there are no changes to these arrangements, the World Cup matches staged in the United States are likely to play out as the latest episode in the long running saga of more cricket in America but little cricket for Americans.
Tom Melville is a lifelong cricket player, historian and author of the recently published “This Too Was America: Philadelphia’s Era of Cricket.” He lives in Wisconsin.
