Cricket’s rise in the United States

Steve Morano
MSMU Class of 2024

(7/2024) On Thursday, June 6th, a sporting upset the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the United States beat the Soviet Union in Ice Hockey at the 1980 Winter Olympics occurred. Yet, the competition received little fanfare to the magnitude that the event should have brought to the United States. Pakistan, one of the greatest cricketing nations on earth was beat in the second round of the ICC T20 World Cup by the United States for the first time ever. A true David versus Goliath matchup, the team that the United States fielded was made up of software engineers and other white-collar laborers upset a field of professionals at the very height of their sport with Pakistan being listed as No. 7 in the world at T20 Cricket. For a game that attracts little to no media coverage amongst a dominate sports media landscape, the growth of cricket in the United States is expected to grow. But it has been here all along, even from the nations birth.

An English game by birth, cricket has often been referred to as one of the last great vestiges of the vast British Empire. Along with the English language itself, cricket was spread to every corner of the empire and has made an impact on many sporting cultures. It is considered to be the most popular sport in the world. With its popular peaking in the former colonies of the West Indies, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, India, and Pakistan, cricket world cup matches are some of the most watched sporting events in history, with the 2011 T20 World Cup final between India and Sri Lanka garnering viewership of 558 million people around the world. With viewership like this, a single world cup final typically outwatches the World Series, NBA Finals, Stanley Cup Finals, and most certainly, the Super Bowl. Only the FIFA World Cup Final is outwatched by more people on Earth, as the 2022 World Cup Final between France and Argentina was watched by 1.5 billion people.

The lack of viewership in the United States is testament to its lack in popularity, where only expatriates of former colonies, children of immigrants, and the more sporting obsessed are up to date on the recent rumblings of the wider cricket world. But it wasn’t always like this. A former colony itself, it can be said that cricket fit in well to Colonial America and the early era of the young republic. Virginians and New Englanders played the game on town greens all across their respective colonies and soldiers of the Continental Army played the game during the long winter of 1777-78 at Valley Forge where a avid player of the game by the name of George Washington joined them in their game of wickets.

At the onset of the United States as we know it today, international games between clubs in the U.S. and Canada often crossed the border to play one another as cricket grounds began to spring up all over the northeast. A team sport in an era where games at a team level were in their infancy, cricket occupied a certain position as a gentlemanly game in the wealthier populations of the country. It was only at the beginning and end of the American Civil War that caused the death of the game in the United States as a framework of professionalism and popularization of the game of baseball caused cricket to go behind closed doors of private, well off clubs for the elite. This caused the death of the sport in the United States as international "tests" were held between other former colonies that caused the game to grow elsewhere.

While baseball grew as the favorite bat and ball sport of Americans, cricket grew in the late 19th and early 20th century in the colonies of the British Empire, particularly in the Indian subcontinent. The longer, more traditional form of the game known as "Test Cricket", where matches can last up to five days prevailed in England and Australia as the favorite form of the game. But with the implementation of forms of the game known as One Day Internationals and Twenty20 or more simply known as "T20" spread the popularity and accessibility of the game to other nations. This lead to the creation of the Indian Premier League and other like competitions in Pakistan, South Africa, and the West Indies led to more lucrative television packages leading to a growth in the popularity of the game across the world through the Cricket World Cup and the T20 World Cup.

Popularity through some of the most populace nations in the world led to the 2024 T20 World Cup, which is being cohosted by the United States and various nations in the West Indies in an attempt to more popularize the game to people that have never even paid attention to it. Stadiums in places like Texas, Florida and New York have led to the construction of temporary stands in regular parks across the U.S., including a 34,000-seater, temporarily built stadium in Long Island, New York. This environment that is meant to foster growth in the sport led to the greatest upset in Cricket history, as the United States dramatically tied Pakistan in regulation play and a dagger in the supper over as the United States outlasted one of the most dominate cricket nations in the world.

With a renaissance in the game in the United States, the aim of the tournament partly hosted in said country is meant to put more eyes on the game domestically. With eh first domestic league in the United States, known as Major League Cricket officially up and running, ut is hard to say that the game will not become popular in the coming decades amongst the sports crazed landscape of North American fandom. But the game itself has a much older origin, only defeated by the rise of America’s Pastime, that should not be forgotten.