Photo The Statesman
Cricket and the Growing Diversity of America’s Sports
By Daniel Knowles
A couple of weeks ago, I was flying back to Chicago from London, where I had been to a friend’s wedding, and I couldn’t help noticing that a very substantial proportion of the other passengers on the plane were wearing Chicago Cubs regalia. The team had been playing against the St Louis Cardinals, rather inexplicably at London Stadium, the venue built for the 2012 Olympics.
Clearly hundreds of Americans had flown across the Atlantic for the spectacle. Yet as I wrote this week , cricket, Britain’s preferred bat-and-ball sport, is going the other way. On July 13th America’s first-ever professional cricket tournament will take to the field in Dallas. It is, inevitably, called Major League Cricket.
Can cricket crack America? It might seem unlikely. But in fact, as my colleague Leo Mirani reported in last year’s Christmas issue, America is as perfectly primed for a revival of cricket as it ever has been. Not only has America acquired a large number of new citizens who come from cricketing countries, but cricket itself has in recent decades become more American. Thanks to the invention of the Twenty20 format, cricket matches can now be condensed down to just a few hours — shorter even than a typical baseball match. The enormously popular Indian Premier League has copied American sports culture wholesale, from franchises with names like the “Mumbai Indians” through to halftime-show spectaculars. Major League Cricket brings that back to America.
But I wonder slightly if that actually is the best way to go about it. These days, sports are another way for people to define themselves. Polling suggests Republicans are far likelier to love brash all-American sports with a high risk of traumatic injury, like NASCAR or college football. Liberals by contrast increasingly love sports that signal how progressive and cosmopolitan they are: tennis, women’s basketball, but most of all, soccer. I am yet to meet a Democratic strategist who does not follow the English Premier League annoyingly closely. (Ironically, in Britain, this works exactly the same way, but inverted. Ed Miliband, a prominent Labor Party politician, is a Boston Red Sox obsessive.) I’m not really sure where an all-American version of cricket, with Stars and Stripes flags everywhere, fits in.
I suspect that, to succeed in America, cricket has to reach out to the same sorts of hipster sports snobs who have bullied their local bartender into opening up at 4am so that they can watch Tottenham Hotspur lose again. There is plenty to be annoyed about with baseball: play that is overly dominated by statistical analysis; the rising number of strikeouts; inflexible rules. But cricket will need evangelists to grow: people who do not just indulge casually, but who, like soccer fans, make it part of their core identity; get up at insane hours to watch it; and force their children to play it. A few decades ago the “soccer mom” was a political cliché. Maybe one day the “cricket dad” might be another. – The Economist
