Few sporting sights this year have been as incongruous as that of Courtney Walsh bowling to Greg Ballard, the mayor of Indianapolis, at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Yet that was what transpired last week as part of the latest attempt to revive cricket in the United States.
Walsh, who took 519 Test wickets for the West Indies, was conducting trials for the ICC Americas team at a new $5m cricket facility in Indianapolis. This team, which will be officially selected in the coming days, will appear in the West Indies’ 50-over domestic competition for the first time next January. Any cricketer in the Americas region is eligible, but American players will dominate the squad.
That the International Cricket Council felt the need to organize independent trials is indicative: it speaks of their lack of regard for the United States of America Cricket Association. “A lot of players were being selected from a minority of the cricket community – that is certainly an issue. We wanted to have an approach that was open and inclusive,” says Tim Anderson, the ICC’s Head of Global Development.
Nominally the governing body of cricket in the US, USACA has long since been regarded as a joke. In June the ICC suspended USACA for the third time in a decade after a review “expressed significant concerns about the governance, finance, reputation and cricketing activities of USACA”.
It is 50 years since the United States were one of the first three associate members admitted to the Imperial Cricket Conference, the forerunner to the ICC. While one of those, Sri Lanka, have won both the World Cup and World T20 and been an established Test nation for over 30 years, the US have stumbled from one calamity to the next. In 2004 the US qualified for the Champions Trophy, featuring the best 12 countries in the world, but this remains their solitary appearance at a world event. There has been a significant growth in the quality of associate nations (those outside the 10 Test-playing countries) since, but not in America.
A paucity of talent is not the issue. David Richardson, the ICC chief executive, has noted that there are more cricketers in the US than Zimbabwe, who are one of the Test-playing nations. US cricket has remained moribund because of “poor administration and lack of vision,” says Usman Shuja, the US’s leading wicket-taker in 50-over cricket who is now a member of the ICC’s local advisory group in the United States. “There have been so many lawsuits, funding challenges and scandals in US cricket in the last seven years.” He was often paid months late.
Players at qualifying tournaments for world events have often met for the first time at the airport. Preparatory events have often been cancelled due to lack of funds. This year’s World T20 Qualifiers in Ireland and Scotland were a classic case in point: the US cancelled their planned preparation tour because of lack of funds, and promptly lost their first three games. They won their next three: with only one more win, the US could now be preparing for the World T20 in India next March.
The sheer size of the US does not help: cricket’s isolated strongholds stretch New York to Dallas and Los Angeles. Yet USACA have failed to develop a proper pyramid structure for talent to be identified and develop. And both USACA and the ICC have seemed more interested in glitzy projects – numerous promised T20 leagues in the country, each seeming more fantastical than the last, that have never materialized, and occasional T20 matches between Test teams in Florida – than developing the sport on the ground. As of 2013, only 975 people played competitive youth cricket, which explains why only two US players in their last match were born in the country. Cricket is akin to a “secret society” says Shuja, who was born in Karachi. “I have six nephews or nieces and none of them play cricket. If US cricket is not able to retain first-generation kids from a family like mine there’s a real problem.”
These are all significant obstacles. Yet if they can be overcome it would not take much for the US to become a competitive cricket team. “If some strong youth and women’s development programs are able to supplement what is already a pretty good playing base and a very significant fan base, cricket in the United States could be something very, very special,” Anderson says, believing that both men and women’s teams could reach the World T20 in 2020. Richardson has declared that he believes the US can qualify for the 2023 World Cup.
These are far from preposterous aims. Cricket is a smaller game than many realize: New Zealand reached the World Cup final despite cricket being the second sport in a country of four million people. So cricket does not need to usurp baseball as the bat-and-ball sport of choice in the US for the country to become very competitive. It just needs organization and structure.
“The American migrant pool is good enough that we can probably get to Zimbabwe’s level without any mainstream American ever playing cricket,” Shuja says. Yet he hopes that, with a proper youth structure and success, “the sport is played by everyone in America and it’s not limited to expats.”
Demographics are emphatically on cricket’s side in the US. The 2010 Census identified 3.8m Americans as identifying from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan or Sri Lanka, the four Test-playing nations in the subcontinent, double the number in 2000. Interest in cricket is real: ESPNCricinfo gets more hits from the US than any country except India, and ICC research has identified that 15m Americans regularly watch cricket on TV.
Grand ambitions for US cricket are nothing new. In 2004, the ICC announces Project USA, a multi-million dollar plan to expand the American game; it was scrapped a year later after disputes with USACA.
The interest the ICC is now showing in US cricket is unprecedented. As well as ensuring the best players can play in Caribbean domestic cricket, Richardson and the ICC have held several town-hall meetings with stakeholders and will not let USACA regain control of US cricket unless the organization systematically reforms. Most likely, an entirely new body will take charge of US cricket. It is enough for Shuja to lament that the ICC did not adopt their approach a decade earlier. “I could have played in a few World Cups if the management was good. The next generation of cricketers won’t miss out like I did.”
As welcome as the ICC’s endeavor is, it has not shown comparable interest in other associates in need of support. After the restructuring of the ICC last year, Australia, England and India stand to receive a far higher percentage of the ICC’s revenue in the coming years. So there would be clear financial gains for the ‘Big Three’ should interest in US cricket develop and cricket broadcasting rights in America come to be worth more.
Yet there is a contradiction underpinning the ICC’s approach. While Richardson has said that the US is “going to be a focus for us in the next few years,” copious ICC decisions have been to the detriment of American cricket.
“For Americans the Olympics are a big deal. The Olympics creates heroes,” Shuja says. “If cricket was in the Olympics it would help a great deal – not just in the US, but in China and other countries as well.” Yet even as baseball pushes to be included in the 2020 Olympic Games, England and India still lead resistance to cricket appearing in the Games. Meanwhile cricket is unique in contracting its World Cup to just 10 teams, even though Shuja says that making a World Cup “would do wonders” for US cricket and a 20-team World Cup in rugby union has helped the sport grow in the US. The World T20 is also being held every four years rather than every two, further reducing opportunities for the American cricket team to reach the world stage.
Cricket’s history in the US is rich. It has been played since 1709, including by George Washington. In 1844, over 10,000 in Manhattan saw the US play Canada in the first ever international cricket match. Teams from the US toured the UK regularly in the years before the First World War. The lush new ground in Indianapolis and the sense that forces in US cricket are now finally pulling together has engendered some tentative optimism. American cricket fans could be excused for thinking they have been here before.
