The first-ever season of Major League Cricket — United States’ first ever professional T20 league sanctioned by USA Cricket — has some takeaways. More than half the games across the two host cities of Dallas and Morrisville in the lead up to the final have been in front of sold out crowds. The star cast has featured the who’s who of T20 cricket in Rashid Khan, Mitchell Marsh, Quinton de Kock, Wanindu Hasaranga, Haris Rauf and more.
Major League Cricket makes a mark, but converting non-cricket watchers to fans the challenge
The broadcast has aired across the country on CBS Sports, home of UEFA Champions League and the two big national love interests in National Football League (NFL) and National Basketball League (NBA). This, with an initial investment pot of over $120 million with investors that included Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. And not to forget, the Minor League Cricket (MiLC), which was launched in 2021 as a developmental league to the MLC with 26 teams of its own and a budget upwards of $5 million.
“What we’re doing here is really transforming the landscape of the sport and giving it a platform to succeed,” Tom Dunmore, Vice President of Marketing at MLC, tells The Indian Express. “It’s not just grafting on the franchise structure and bringing in players, it’s the whole foundation of the sport. Stadium, practice facilities, coaches, the expertise in groundskeeping, preparing a wicket properly, all those things that the USA hasn’t had a rich tradition of in recent years because it is difficult.”
A T20 World Cup is being co-hosted next summer and cricket is set to be introduced to the Olympics in Los Angeles five years down the line.
“The timelines work pretty well,” Dunmore says.
But will cricket really catch on in the United States? It makes sense according to the marketing guy. “I do think if you know baseball, which most Americans obviously do, you really love a bat-ball sport with a lot of the same fundamentals as cricket,” Dunmore says. “If you go to Brazil or Italy, where there isn’t a big bat and ball sport, it’s going to be harder. At least here, we can translate that a six is a home run. You’re caught out when the ball’s in the air, things like that. They take some explaining. Some terminology of cricket can be a bit arcane. Why is a wicket three different things, for example. But once you get past that, I think the Americans can adopt the game pretty quickly.”
The first impressions have been ‘pleasantly’ surprising. “They’re actually surprised at how much action there is up against what they actually thought of the sport. The ball is in play a lot more in cricket. There’s a lot more big hitting, a lot more scoring, a lot more home runs/sixes.”
It isn’t the first time that the USA has looked outside of its fantastic four – Baseball, Basketball, American Football, Hockey – to adopt a more internationally followed sport. Not the first time Dunmore has been involved in doing so as well, having worked behind the scenes in America’s soccer revolution. With Major League Soccer (MLS) well into its 28th season, it was about time for ‘world’s second most popular sport’, as it has been introduced to the uninitiated.
Cricket though, is no soccer. “It’s a tough sport, right? It’s not like soccer where you can just pop it up on any rectangular field essentially, and play. Cricket takes a lot more work to get right and do it at a high level,” Dunmore states.
“I’ve got a history of helping grow sports or introduce sports in the US,” Dunmore tells with a chuckle, before sharing a past that connects both him and America to cricket. “I grew up a cricket fan in England. Got connected to it more when I lived in Indianapolis, which had a cricket pitch built several years ago. There were some high ambitions for em’, even the ICC hosted some events there. Indianapolis had a really good vision for it. Didn’t quite pan out in the end but I got connected to some of the cricket folks in the US at that point. And then, got the chance to help launch this (MLC).”
Who’s playing and watching it in the States?
“The feeling has been like playing cricket in India,” says LA Knight Riders’ Jaskaran Malhotra of his on-ground MLC experience. The Chandigarh-born USA cricketer, the first to hit six sixes in an over for the national side, isn’t far-fetched in his assessment. The two venues in the league have witnessed the local South East Asian diaspora take to the stands in large numbers. From Afghanistan flags to Sri Lanka and India jerseys. “Pakistani players don’t feature in the IPL but here we have them. The likes of Shadab (Khan) and Haris (Rauf)….the standard of cricket has been very high,” Malhotra adds.
“The feeling has been like playing cricket in India,” says LA Knight Riders’ Jaskaran Malhotra of his on-ground MLC experience.
There is then, the question of how the other ethnicities in the country are responding to the sport, if at all? “In my academy in Baltimore, Maryland, there are a lot of local people who are taking up the sport. White, native and African Americans,” says the USA cricketer. “My entire extended family is based out of here. They are getting warmed up to the sport. People who have stayed in America for five generations are now enjoying it.”
In order to ignite a fan culture, the MLC Vice President of Marketing takes to the white board, “We already have millions of cricket fans here, which is a really great base to start with. There’s a whole generation of expats from cricket loving countries, who are exposed to the sport but aren’t going to be fans of the US team unless we give them something to cheer for. And that’s the chance that we have for the first time. If you’re a fan growing up in Dallas, you can support your hometown team now in cricket. That’s not been the case before. If we can win that generation over as well as the immigrants that are already here… then it’s about converting kids that didn’t grow up with cricket. That will take a bit of trial and error but we want to solely increase the percentage of fans that didn’t grow up with cricket.”
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For former England World Cup-winning pacer Liam Plunkett as well, cricket in the USA has been a familiar experience. “It has felt like a proper cricket tournament with packed crowds supporting all the sides involved,” he tells. The pacer’s LinkedIn bio speaks for itself: Starting a new adventure in the USA. Playing at Surrey Cricket Club during the fag end of his career, Plunkett was reached out by the MLC not just to play but “structure the national development coach role. Look after the players and help run the Philadelphia academy.”
Does he picture MLC making it to the big league status; like IPL is to cricket or NFL is to the USA? “I mean, that’s huge in America, isn’t it? NFL is like cricket in India. A religion to a lot of Americans. IPL is a different ball game altogether. If we can even climb the ladder towards that it would be amazing. But it would take a lot of time.”
With a World Cup and a first cricket featuring Olympics on the horizon, the land of opportunity has another.
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