Texas Super Kings players celebrate during a Major League Cricket match against the Los Angeles Knight Riders in Grand Prairie, Texas, on Thursday night - LM Otero/AP
Wake up, America, This Kind of Cricket Isn’t ‘Baseball on Valium’
By Matt Thacker
In 1987, comedian Robin Williams told a British audience : “We have baseball. You have cricket, which is like baseball on Valium.” Some 30 years before that, Groucho Marx, in London watching a match at Lord’s, the spiritual home of cricket, concluded: “ What a wonderful cure for insomnia .”
Americans might hold similar views of cricket as it is being played this summer by England and Australia in “the Ashes,” so called because, in 1882, the Sporting Times published a mock obituary for the game after England lost — “deeply lamented by a large circle of sorrowing friends and acquaintances. R.I.P. … The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia.”
But the Ashes is “Test” cricket , in which the matches last five full days, with no guarantee of either side winning. The five-match series began in mid-June and won’t be completed until the end of July.
That kind of cricket is not to be confused with the fast-paced brand making its debut in the United States this summer with Major League Cricket . The inaugural match was played Thursday night at the 7,200-capacity Grand Prairie Stadium near Dallas.
Major League Cricket plays Twenty20 or T20 cricket, a version of the sport that, to the horror of cricket traditionalists, has dramatically shortened matches, appealing to diminished attention spans and the wishes of TV executives who want games that start and finish within a few hours.
The matches involve 20 overs per side (an over consists of six balls delivered, or thrown, by the bowler to a batsman — a baseball fan would consider them pitches), three hours max, multiple sixes (home runs, if you must), stunning athleticism and all the razzamatazz you would expect of any sporting occasion in the United States.
Domestic T20 leagues have proliferated across the cricket-playing world and enjoy more cachet with millions of fans than the stodgier international game.
The arrival of T20 in the United States was perhaps inevitable, given the country’s increasing population of immigrants from cricket-mad India , Pakistan and the Caribbean .
But it isn’t as though the United States is without cricket history. The sport’s first-ever international match was between the United States and Canada, played in New York in 1844. And, of course, baseball traces its roots to a form of cricket called rounders.
It is perhaps fitting, then, that Major League Cricket launched Thursday night at the renovated former home of the Texas AirHogs minor league baseball team, with the Texas Super Kings comfortably defeating the Los Angeles Knight Riders in front of a full house . The Super Kings’ captain, South African Faf du Plessis, praised the contributions from homegrown American talent, saying it’s “good to see the local boys perform.”
The league’s four other sides are Washington Freedom, Seattle Orcas, San Francisco Unicorns and MI New York (MI for its association with the Mumbai Indians). Each side is allowed a roster of 16 to 19 players, with a maximum of nine international players and a minimum of 10 domestic players (one of them an under-23). The matchday side can have a maximum of six overseas players.
The game in Grand Prairie commenced a 17-day tournament, with the league’s six teams boasting a genuinely impressive cricketing cast list from all over the world.
Major League Cricket’s financial backing includes $120 million from investors, including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Adobe Chair and CEO Shantanu Narayen . The league’s strategic partner, American Cricket Enterprises , is backed by Sameer Mehta and Vijay Srinivasan, founders of Willow TV (the largest cricket broadcaster in North America, with more than 4 million subscribers) and the Times Group, one of India’s largest media companies.
Two of the MLC team franchises have partnered with Australian cricket sides , and the other four are owned by groups that run teams in India. The matches are likely to appeal to anyone from cricket-playing countries around the globe, but make no mistake: The MLC project is driven by Indian interest in the sport.
With an Indian American population of 4.8 million and growing, and the fact that they are the United States’ highest earning ethnic group , the thought process for starting a US league is clear — in India, the sports market is 90 percent dominated by cricket.
The introduction of T20 cricket in the United States this summer might be a harbinger of something bigger: The World Cup will be held next year in the West Indies and United States , a major breakthrough for the sport in the land of baseball, and there are rumors that cricket will be added as an Olympic sport for the 2028 Games in Los Angeles.
It’s a shame Robin Williams and Groucho Marx aren’t around to see the changes — as many Americans may soon discover, there’s no danger of dozing off in modern cricket.
(Matt Thacker is the managing editor of Wisden (U.K.) Cricket Monthly) - Washington Post
