How cricket (finally) cracked America

On Monday something unexpected happened in downtown Manhattan. The Empire State Building, for so long the architectural symbol of American life, was lit up in blue and red, the colours of the International Cricket Council. Flicking the switch to crank up the illumination was Chris Gayle, the former West Indies international, a cricketer renowned for his six-hitting abilities.

“The Big Apple, take a bite,” Gayle told The Telegraph of his involvement. “Cricket is coming. America, are you ready?”

If it seems the most unlikely piece of sporting evangelism, the equivalent of Extinction Rebellion trying to sign up the board of BP as new members, Gayle is not being wholly fanciful in his insistence that the USA is the new frontier of cricket. The New York light show was there to celebrate the fact that, on June 9, India will play Pakistan in a T20 World Cup match in a new cricket stadium built in the city. All 34,000 tickets for the game have long been sold. And that could just be the start.

“The appetite is definitely there,” says Liam Plunkett, the former England international who these days lives with his American wife in Philadelphia. “More kids in Houston play cricket than play baseball. Every weekend I can go and find a hundred games of cricket in my area. There’s academies popping up left, right and centre.

“Even if they don’t play themselves, every American I know will have seen a game going on in their local park. It’s here.”

It certainly is: the former Texas AirHogs baseball stadium in Grande Prairie was redeveloped into a Major League Cricket (MLC) stadium in 2021, and will act as the base for the US National Teams.

In the past, even as recently as 20 years ago, the very idea of cricket making inroads into the American sporting landscape would have been viewed as fanciful. This was a sport, after all, long dismissed there as an adjunct of British colonialism.

Back in Victorian times, when games were first codified, in the US it was a point of cultural pride not to embrace the pursuits of the former imperial master. Gridiron was invented as a local version of rugby and football. And baseball was the all-American preference to cricket. Never mind that the rest of the world embraced the British models, in the USA the future lay in homegrown offshoots. Cricket in particular was mocked as a weirdo British obsession, a manifestation of the class system, competed over days, often without a proper conclusion. That’s if it was thought about at all.

But times – and more particularly demographics – change. While America might have sneered, in other parts of the empire, cricket was cheerfully absorbed. In the Indian subcontinent it grew into a national obsession. The Indian Premier League (IPL), the annual two-month-long competition involving all the world’s best players, has become one of the most commercially lucrative sporting franchises in the world. And, in the same manner that British travellers took their sports round the world with them in the 1800s, so in recent times the South Asian diaspora have brought their love of the game with them as they have taken positions in American medical and tech businesses. Hundreds of thousands of Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and Bangladeshis have arrived in the US in recent times, bats tucked under their arms.

One of them is Ali Khan. When he was 19, his family moved from Pakistan to Dayton, Ohio, where his uncle was working in IT. A more than useful player in his teens, he reckons his entire childhood had consisted of playing the game on the streets of Attock in the Punjab. There was, he thought, no chance of doing that now he had moved to the US.

“My cricket dreams were pretty much over,” he recalls. “I arrived thinking there was no way anyone plays in America. I soon found out how wrong I was.”

Within days of his arrival, his uncle had told him about the Dayton cricket club. This was a social collective largely formed as a chance for south Asians to gather and bond, a hint of home in a foreign land. Khan went along for a trial and scared the living daylights out of everyone there with the pace of his bowling. A couple of months later, he saw on Facebook that a tournament was being organised in Florida. He got himself an invite and took four wickets in the quarter final. By 2015, he had been picked to play in competitions in the Caribbean and made his debut for the USA cricket team the following year.

“It was made up of expats,” he says of the national side, in which he played against countries like Oman, Canada and the UAE. “Indians mostly, but others from the Caribbean, Pakistan and Sri Lanka too. Plus a couple of players who were born here, the children of immigrants who had taken a love of the game from their parents.”

These days Khan is a full-time professional cricketer, playing in T20 leagues around the world. He became the first USA international to be bought by an IPL franchise. Then last summer he played in the debut season of MLC, the new US-based competition designed to copy the IPL methodology. Loud, brash, colourful and above all fast, its very purpose upends many of the prejudices held by the American sporting public of cricket.

“We played in front of packed houses every game,” says Khan, who these days lives in Houston, which has become the epicentre for the American game. “What I’ve noticed recently is that before, when I told people I played cricket, they said, ‘What is that?’ Now [when] I say I play cricket, they say, ‘Oh, nice’. I say, ‘How do you know it?’ They say they’ve seen it on social media. Sometimes it pops up on your screen even if you’re not interested.”

Indeed, played by a community which underpins the American IT business, the game’s social media presence is almost as noisy as an IPL team shirt. And with that burgeoning awareness has come financial investment. Last year’s MLC was played in two centres: Dallas and Morrisville, North Carolina. This year’s iteration will be played in six purpose-built stadiums around the country, including the New York facility which will host that T20 World Cup game. And then there is the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, which for the first time will include cricket. A USA team will compete in it, just as they are in the forthcoming T20 World Cup.

“I think these tournaments will do for cricket what [the USA hosting] the football World Cup did in the 90s,” says Plunkett, who is signed up to play in the MLC in July. “These days you come into Philly and you see more soccer pitches than American football or baseball. I think cricket could develop like that.

“Locally, I don’t think people realise how big cricket is. I tell them if you had one of the biggest athletes in America standing here next to Virat Kohli [the Indian team captain], there’d be a bigger queue for Virat Kohli.”

Not that everyone is enchanted by the rapid growth of the immigrant game. Back in 2009 in Loudoun County, Virginia, a semi-rural suburb south of Washington, there were just five teams playing cricket in the area. Now, with the huge influx of south Asians recruited into local tech businesses, there are 60 clubs and more than 3,000 players. With only five pitches in the county, the local league got planning permission to build a number of wickets, training space and attendant car parking on the site of an ill-used baseball facility in Mickie Gordon Park. But here’s the thing: the park is named after a pioneering coach in a local informal black baseball league. Via online petitions, placards on lawns and vociferous community meetings, the locals are objecting to the new use of the place, not wanting his heritage tarnished.

“It’s not fair to our community to completely change the nature, character, and amenities that are here,” Bridge Lyttleton, the local mayor, told the Washingtonian.

This is a culture war fought around a set of three wooden stumps. But it is a war in which it appears there is only going to be one winner.

“In development terms, we’re still at ground zero,” says Plunkett. “But everything’s happening so quickly. We’re getting the game into schools. And once it’s there, once kids and their parents can see a pipeline into a proper professional sport, there’s no stopping it. Cricket is the future.”