World Cup fever: Why US is on the crest of riding a cricket wave
With Indian-origin people estimated to represent 1.3 per cent of the overall US population, it’s no surprise teams from the subcontinent will be roared along at the T20 World Cup in the USA. Make no mistake, the grandstand crowds won’t be ignorant.
My brother moved to the United States in July 2002. He was one of 71,105 Indians that year who set upon this long passage to potentially fulfil living the American dream. At that point, there were close to 1.6 million US nationals of Indian-descent, around 0.6 per cent of the overall population.
The most recent census survey, 22 years later, shows the USA has nearly 5 million nationals of Indian descent, of whom nearly 3 million were born in India – second only to Mexico in immigration. In 22 out of 50 states, if you leave Mexicans out, India is the most common country of birth for foreign-born residents.
Indian-origin people are estimated to represent 1.3 per cent of the overall US population, with tens of thousands applying for migrant visas monthly. To put it into context, the wait time to get an interview appointment while applying for a US visa from Melbourne is around 24 days as compared with 400 days in Bangalore.
So, if you’re one of those who simply can’t get your head around why the USA is about to co-host a cricket event – that, too, a T20 World Cup – you know now. It’s not just the Indian diaspora, of course. There’s also a massive glut of Pakistani and Bangladeshi influence spread all over the US, and especially in the three centres that will see live action: Long Island, Dallas and Fort Lauderdale in Florida, which has been the unofficial home for international cricket in the US for a few years anyway.
Although still a student then, my brother bought a nameplate that read “Tendlya”, Sachin Tendulkar’s local nickname in Mumbai, for his first car. Within weeks, though, he’d sold the nameplate off for nearly 20 times the price to an older and wealthier Indian in Washington DC. This is not to simply say he’s always been smarter than me when it comes to money, but also to show cricket to a lot of South Asian settlers in America is their identity – and not just with their own peer group. It’s also their connection with the motherland they left behind.
So, it isn’t simply their collective and manic love for cricket that has made the US such a tempting proposition for those running the sport. It runs deeper than that.
While the opening game of the World Cup on Sunday will pit the North American neighbours, and potential rivals, the USA and Canada in Dallas, the one contest that probably the entire US leg is centred around takes place on June 9 at the Nassau County International Cricket Stadium. A venue that was completed only a couple of weeks ago, and where the pitches have been designed by Adelaide’s own outstanding curator Damian Hough.
And tickets for the India-Pakistan clash are already selling at close to $US30,000 ($45,000) on the black market. That number will grow as we get closer to the match. Two big-seater New York City stadiums, meanwhile, have already been sold out for watch parties. Without a ball being bowled yet, and to nobody’s surprise, the forever high-grossing contest between the South Asian archrivals is already a big hit on American shores and could well become a regular affair in the future.
Funnily enough. It was Canada was the first country in that region to embrace the opportunity of tapping into their own burgeoning South Asian diaspora by organising the Sahara Cup, a five-match ODI series between India and Pakistan, in Toronto that was played annually over three years from 1996 before the Kargil war to an end to it in 1999. And though Canada have been semi-regulars at world events since then, they have fallen behind the USA in some ways when it comes to being the bastion of cricket in North America.
So, there will be a lot more than regional pride to play for when the Canadians take on the Americans, both squads filled with players of South Asian descent and including some who’ve played a lot of domestic cricket in their original homelands. If you are a cricket nerd like me, you’ve puffed out your chest at some point and gloated about how the first competitive international sporting event, yes not just a cricket match, of renown was played between the USA and Canada in 1844 in Philadelphia. Or that the first public report of a cricket match in North America was recorded in 1751, that too in New York. Yeah, imagine that. Cricket journalists have been around for more than 250 years.
There are also names from American history who you’d never imagine otherwise being associated with cricket. Benjamin Franklin is the one who’s attributed with bringing the laws of the game to the USA. Even former presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are believed to have been interested in watching the sport, if not playing it. There’s also JM Fox, the godfather of golf in the US, who was originally a cricket captain.
According to an article in the Smithsonian Magazine, the people who were said to be fond of cricket in that era were “men of fashion”. And that it was only the enigmatic emergence of baseball, and the logistical ease in everyone being able to play the sport that pushed cricket to the background in the USA.
Kudos to the ICC then for acknowledging the cricket nerds by making sure that the opener for this World Cup will be a repeat of that historic contest from 180 years ago, now on a more global stage.
In many ways though, however, the 16 matches scheduled for the USA during the tournament are received, what happens right after the World Cup might have a bigger say on the future of cricket in the USA. The second edition of Major League Cricket (MLC) kicks off less than a week after the T20 World Cup final. There’ll be some high-profile Australian players involved, too, especially with Steve Smith, Travis Head and Glenn Maxwell all set to play for Washington Freedom, who will be coached by Ricky Ponting.
In a significant development this week, the ICC have now given official status to the MLC, which will mean that all player performances will now be credited in their domestic career records. Not to forget the expectation of the number of teams increasing soon enough in the league, the investors in teams including some IPL owners or other high-profile Indian-origin businessmen and even the Microsoft CEO, and the overall growth of appetite for cricket in the USA.
There is some irony to the MLC being the flagbearer for this cause though. It was while studying in the USA that Lalit Modi, one of the founders of the IPL, is said to have conceived the idea of cricket becoming a league-based capitalist behemoth. And how now it looks like that the best way of colonising the El Dorado that cricket has sought for so long will be through a concept that was borrowed from the USA. Just as likely as the days of getting surprised over the USA and cricket being spoken in the same breath will be long behind us.
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