Cricket in US still has a way to go with potential fans stumped by basic rules

If the sport here is headed anywhere, bet on it being towards becoming the home to another thriving franchise league

The shuttle bus was a squeeze, with more passengers than seats, and now someone needed to get up for the elderly couple who were the last ones on board. Two Dutch fans were the first up, and they got talking to the two newcomers in the way people do when they’re on their way to a game. Yes, it was their first time in the city, and yes, they had come all this way to watch the Netherlands play South Africa, one of their clubmates was playing in it, and he had fixed the tickets for them. The older man, sitting down now, hadn’t come so far. He and his wife lived ten minutes up the road.

Golf was his sport, he said, but they had shut his local course for the fortnight because of the tournament, and he had decided to come and see why. It was going to be their first game of cricket, but he had been trying to follow it on TV. “Big upset last night, Afghanistan beating New Zealand,” he said, in a thick Long Island accent. The Dutchmen agreed with him. “I gotta question,” he went on, “the, whaddya call him, the battah, does he have to run every time he hits it?” By the time we pulled into the stadium, they were into the intricacies of swing bowling, climatic conditions, and laminar flow. “So when it’s humid there’s more curve on the ball?”

So that’s one the International Cricket Council has won over.

He’ll be back on his course by the weekend. After nine games in 12 days, the New York leg of the World Cup is winding down. The ground is going to be packed up and put away after India’s game against the USA, and soon enough the only cricket being played in the city will be the local league matches on patches of park in the Bronx and Queens. The outfield will be left at the Nassau County ground and, the ICC says a new artificial wicket laid in the middle of it. The ten drop-in turf pitches are going to be “distributed around the country”. There are so few facilities in the USA that even the green and dog-eared lot they’ve been using here are an improvement.

The pitches turned out to be one significant hitch in the tournament. The need for rolled wickets was one of the big reasons why cricket was overtaken by baseball in the US to begin with. It’s not immediately clear whether the ICC, or its broadcast partners, appreciated the irony that they were still struggling with the problem 150 years later. It has four years to figure out how it is going to fix it before the next big international game scheduled to be held in the US, at the LA Olympics in 2028. Other complaints included a lack of marketing, which, coupled with high prices, and the early starts meant that only one of the nine games in New York was sold out.

As far as the players go, “I think all the batters are keen to get out of this place, to be fair, but the bowlers would love to stay,” offered Heinrich Klaasen after South Africa’s third match here. “I’ve played in Dallas and in North Carolina where the wickets are better, which makes it easier to sell cricket.” This surface, he said, simply wasn’t mature enough. “It’s fantastic what they’ve done with the stadium here, but better conditions will make a better showcase for the people. I think they’ve done an incredible job, but I would have liked to have seen more scores of 150 to 160.” At the time of writing, no one had beaten Canada’s 137 against Ireland, or David Miller’s 59 against the Dutch.

Weighed against all that, the tricky conditions actually made for entertaining games because they brought the weaker teams into it, and often produced close finishes. Besides which, the pitches were only one of a welter of things that could have gone wrong. The pop-up stadium worked, the security was sure, the transport was slick, and the turnout was good, especially for the games involving India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. No doubt England and the West Indies could draw an expat audience here too.

Whether the game can ever grow much beyond that is another question. The ICC talks about breaking into “the mainstream”, which seems like a pipe-dream, even allowing for the old golfer on the bus. The real question is whether or not the fans who are already here can be persuaded to support the sport domestically. The USA already have a good team. But even with their victory over Pakistan, the most significant development in US cricket these last few weeks may have been the one that was slipped out in a press release this time last week, when the San Francisco Unicorns announced they had signed Pat Cummins on a four-year deal.

As a statement of intent, signing Cummins is about as big as it gets outside of persuading the Board of Control for Cricket in India to release Virat Kohli. Major League Cricket is a small league, but has room to expand, and a group of committed and well connected investors behind it. It has already built a minor league and several academies, and now is planning to develop a series of permanent venues in its host cities.

“I think 10 years from now, I think you’re going to see a very different landscape for cricket in the US,” the chief executive, Vijay Srinivasan, told me. “Put aside the league. I mean, by then we’ll have a very sort of robust set of venues around the country. We’ll have a home and away format for MLC, and we’ll have a much larger pool of players as a result in the system. And hopefully that means we’ll have a very strong sort of USA team so we will see full members coming to play in the USA.” They’re especially keen to arrange games with Australia on the west coast.

If cricket’s headed anywhere in this country, wager on it being towards becoming the home to another thriving franchise league.

Quote of the week

“To be honest, that wasn’t a good call, for us It was a tight match. So, I think in my point of view, umpire gave it out, but it’s a bit hard for us because those four runs would have changed the match. So, I don’t have anything to say about it” – Bangladesh’s Tawid Hridoy says everything, while insisting he has nothing to say at all. He was (not) talking about the curious law that cost his team victory in their group game against South Africa on Monday. The incident was in the 17th over, when Mahmudullah was given out lbw to a ball that was clearly missing the leg stump. After it hit his pads, it ran away to the boundary for four leg-byes. But because the umpire had already given the wicket, the extras didn’t count. Mahmudullah used a review to overturn the decision (the ball was clearly missing the wicket) but the leg-byes were never reinstated, and in the end, inevitably, Bangladesh lost the game by exactly four runs. It’s a silly law, expect it to be changed soon.

Memory lane

To March 1998: the England assistant coach John Emburey (left) and Robert Croft look on as the now-Guardian columnist Mark Ramprakash bats during a game of beach cricket in Barbados before their fifth Test against West Indies. Ramprakash clearly had his eye in, hitting 154 and also taking a wicket in the Test, but the match in Bridgetown ended as a draw. The hosts went on to secure the series 3-1 with an innings victory at the final Test in St John’s.

Still want more

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And Ali Martin explains how, among all the other problems, England’s listing T20 World Cup campaign is all going to come down to whether the Australian team take pity on the Scots or not.

And Gary Naylor picks over the week in county cricket, with Lancashire and Sussex leading the way in the T20 Blast.

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