Can Cricket Recolonize America? (Oliver Wiseman, June 8, 2024, Free Press)


Tomorrow, New York’s Long Island suburbs will host a game expected to be viewed by twice as many people as the Super Bowl. Most Americans, however, don’t know the rules of the sport being played and would find it impossible to follow—unless they were watching with a very patient friend from England, or India, or Australia.

I am talking, of course, about cricket, and this Sunday’s clash between the fierce sporting—not to mention geopolitical—rivals, India and Pakistan. Ticket prices are approaching Taylor Swift levels, and when the first ball (that’s pitch in baseball speak) is bowled (thrown) at 10:30 a.m., half a billion people around the world are expected to tune in to watch it. […]


It was not always so. What most Americans don’t realize is cricket has real roots here. Benjamin Franklin himself brought a copy of the rules over to the colonies in 1754. Washington’s troops played pickup games of “wicket” at Valley Forge. Abraham Lincoln was a cricket fan. Central Park’s North Meadow was once a cricket pitch. And the first ever international cricket match was played between America and Canada right here in New York in 1844. The greatest sport known to man was once as American as apple pie!

Things went wrong around the time of the Civil War. According to one theory, young American men were too busy killing each other to futz around with the complicated preparations that cricket requires. Also, a traditional game can last up to five days. A pickup game of baseball was easier to squeeze in between battles. Enterprising baseball promoters took it from there, but it helped that in 1909, cricket was organized under a body called the Imperial Cricket Council, which allowed only countries that were part of the British Empire to participate. Give me liberty or give me cricket, in other words. The Americans chose liberty.

But these days, Americans can have both.