Admin May 13, 2024
Cricket awaits a new dawn in the United States of America, home to some of the world’s most successful sporting leagues. The International Cricket Council (ICC) is finally making headway with cricket being re-introduced in the Olympics at the 2028 Los Angeles Games. The immediate push in the USA comes with the T20 World Cup which it co-hosts with the West Indies next month.
Although for now, cricket is just a curiosity for the average American – baseball’s cousin trying to find its feet. This despite expatriates from the Indian sub-continent comprising the biggest captive audience in the US.
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Venu Pisike, chairman, USA Cricket, though is keen on wider acceptance. “The World Cup and the Olympics in the next four years is a wonderful opportunity to grow the sport and remove the expat tag to the cricket community,” he says.
An article on the USA Cricket website calls the game a ‘burgeoning sport’. But a recent online survey in the country by YouGov found that only 6% of the respondents were aware of the T20 World Cup while 52% among those believed the USA team would lift the trophy.
Now, the USA team does include a New Zealand World Cupper in Corey Anderson. But at 33, his best years may be behind him. Half the squad is made up of players who cut their teeth in Indian domestic cricket. The Monank Patel-led USA side’s best chance may be a win over Canada, and potentially pulling off another upset in the league phase. Few back them to qualify for the Super 8 stage in the 20-team tournament.
“There are challenges,” Pisike says. “One thing is to develop stars. That will happen as our team performs. The other challenge is any sport requires pathways and opportunities to get into colleges and scholarships. That is something that’s missing and we need to develop programmes for people to adopt cricket as a sport.
“The advantage we have, even though we are an Associate member, (is that) there is a large fan base already available. Close to half a million active players participate in the country.”
A stumbling block to development has been poor administration over the years. USA Cricket is playing a limited role in the conduct of the tournament with limited funds released by ICC to it due to governance issues. Pisike says: “Majority of the burden in setting up stadiums and operations for the World Cup is being borne by the ICC”.
A 34,000-seater temporary stadium with drop-in pitches is coming up in New York that will stage the big-ticket India-Pakistan clash. Matches will also be staged in Dallas, Texas and Lauderhill, Florida.
“It’s not the long-term way,” says Pisike. “The policy and processes required in this country; it would not have met the timeline to build a stadium. Besides, a pop-up stadium in a few months has created more awareness for the sport. For long term, we have partnered with our commercial partners to build multiple stadiums in the next few years which will help host big events in the future.”
Even as brand ambassadors Usain Bolt and Yuvraj Singh spread the word for next month’s T20 World Cup, a lot of the marketing centres around the showpiece India-Pakistan clash.
