American Cricket’s (World) Cup runneth over

The US was not among the 10 teams that qualified for World Cup, but there was, for the first time ever, an American interest in the sport’s international competition.

By Bobby Ghosh

One of the planet’s biggest sporting events came to a climactic conclusion last Sunday, with Australia upsetting the odds to beat hosts India in the final of the ICC Cricket World Cup. The US was not among the 10 teams that qualified for the tournament, but there was, for the first time ever, an American interest in the sport’s international competition.

That’s thanks to this summer’s inaugural season of Major League Cricket. Fourteen of the 51 overseas players who were spread across the MLC’s six teams featured at the World Cup, with the South African pair of Quinton De Kock (Seattle Orcas) and David Miller (Texas Super Kings) catching the eye with big performances.

But, to gratuitously mix sporting metaphors, the US will have much more skin in the game next summer, when it co-hosts the next World Cup, along with seven Caribbean islands. Around a third of the 55 games will be played in three American venues — one each in New York’s Nassau County, Florida’s Broward County and Dallas, Texas — and the US national team will get automatic qualification.

There will be an economic dividend, too. Cricket is the world’s second-most popular sport after football, which makes it highly attractive for international brands. Advertising around World Cups is an especially effective way for companies to connect with the vast Indian market: The nation of 1.4 billion people is famously cricket-mad. Each of the three American venues can also expect a boost in tourism, as fans follow their teams.

In case you’re wondering how there can be World Cups, which tend to be quadrennial, in consecutive years, this is as good a place as any to pause for an explanation. The sport is played in three formats, all of them governed by the International Cricket Council: “Test” cricket games are played over five days; “one-day international” contests, or ODIs, usually run to seven or eight hours each; and “T20” matches, the format chosen for the MLC, last roughly the duration of a baseball game. The recently concluded World Cup was for ODIs, the one coming up next June will be for the T20 version.

Back to the point I was making: The T20 World Cup will again serve as a showcase for the MLC’s stars. More than that, it will also be a show window for international talent hoping to be snapped up by teams for the second season, which will be played shortly thereafter. “There’s already some buzz about the MLC among top players,” Tom Dunmore, the league’s head of marketing, tells me. “When they get a chance to experience cricket in America, more of them will want to join us.”

More stars will allow the MLC to expand its audience, at home and abroad, after a good first season: Dunmore says 92% of ticket capacity was sold out and games were broadcast in 87 countries.

Next year’s World Cup will benefit American cricket more generally. In addition to giving homegrown cricketers exposure to top-level competition, it may also convert more Americans to the sport — doing for cricket what the 1994 FIFA World Cup did for football. “When you have the best in the world playing in your backyard and an international audience of hundreds of millions following closely, some of that excitement is bound to rub off,” Dunmore says.

Investment in infrastructure will help, too: A new cricket stadium will be built in Nassau County and the one in South Florida will be expanded. Oswego, Illinois, is reported to be planning a cricket stadium, too, even though it is not expected to be used for the World Cup.

And as if to keep the momentum going, cricket will also feature in the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. By then, the LA Knight Riders, co-owned by Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, should have a purpose-built cricket stadium up and running.

This is all excellent news for the US national cricket team, currently ranked a respectable 22nd in the world. In addition to increased interest and investment in the sport, World Cups also provide inspiration. Arguably, the most remarkable performances in the tournament just concluded came from Afghanistan, which broke into the sport’s top tier less than a decade ago, with none of the advantages now accruing to American cricket. There’s no reason the US team can’t, to mix sports metaphors again, swing for the fences.