Cricket's New City of Gold

GH on cricket in the US and its risks

The Federation of International Cricket Associations has just rolled out a tool for players, the Leagues Hub, which is essentially a dashboard of domestic T20 and T10 leagues round the world.

It serves primarily as a caveat emptor for potential talent: you might think twice, for example, before committing to Canada’s Smash N Grab T20, although I’d have thought the name here alone might betray its baser instincts. But it also offers a snapshot of cricket’s patterns of growth, as the country with the most leagues listed, nine, is the United States - where, of course, three cities are set to host matches in the T20 World Cup beginning two months hence.

The biggest is Major League Cricket, whose three-week season last year featured six teams - four aligned with Indian Premier League franchises, two with Big Bash League teams. The sides bore the names of major American cities, although all the games were concluded at two rather out-of-the-way venues: Grand Prairie Stadium in Grand Prairie, Texas, and Church Street Park in Morrisville, North Carolina. The USA Masters T10, which then proceeded last August, was held at Lauderhill, whose Central Broward Park also hosted the US Premier League, and will host India in their games against the US and Canada in mid-June. 

It’s hard to resist the enticements of the American Premier League, whose seven teams, based on nationality, feature a team called the Premium Aussies. ’If you know how to play cricket, then American Premier League needs you,’ its website says excitedly. 'This is your chance to play alongside one of the biggest cricket stars from across the globe, in front of a packed crowd!’ But the name of the star is undisclosed and the crowd will be at Moosa Stadium, Houston (even before you start worrying about the monster macropod bearing down on Sydney).

This is a problem for American cricket. There is lots of it, but there exists no obvious centre, no particular concentration. To scale up to a league that might approximate parity with the big American sports would require a genuine quantum leap. Short, sharp T10 and T20 leagues, then, are an interim solution. The Unity Cup will proceed in Bolen Park, Washington next month with a $US120,000 stake for first; the Atlanta Open will later bring sixteen teams from ‘all over the Americas’, which will be quite a hike.

Cricket’s American promotors are apt to talk of its deep roots. In discussing the best possible name for the chief executive of the new republic, John Adams observed that ‘there are Presidents of fire companies and cricket clubs’. Abraham Lincoln purportedly watched a game between Chicago and Milwaukee in 1849. Among the boosters has been Chuck Ramkisson, the mercurial Trinidadian cricket evangelist who dominates Joseph O’Neill’s delicious novel Netherland: 

It is wrong to see cricket in America as most people see it i.e. an immigrant sport. It is a bona fide American pastime. . . . All those who have attempted to “introduce” cricket to the American public have failed to understand this. Cricket is already in the American DNA. With proper promotion, marketing, government support etc awareness of the game could easily be reawakened. American kids could once again play their country’s oldest team sport!

Cricket was televised in Los Angeles as far back as 1958, when two hours of a match between Hollywood and Corinthians were shown on a local station - if that is the maximum American attention span, then cricket’s multiplying short forms might be made to measure.

Be that as it may, cricket still rests lightly on the face of American sports because of its diffusion and its semi-professionalism, at the same time as being menaced by some of the same threats - and a very obvious one is being overlooked. In 2018, in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, the US Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act which for decades had secured sport's floodgates against gambling. Everyone’s favourite originalist, Justice Samuel Alito, led the general washing of hands: ’The legalization of sports gambling requires an important policy choice. But the choice is not ours to make.’ Thirty-eight states have legalized sports betting in some form since with the scantiest regulation. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, out of control: the value of the market last year exceeded $US100 billion.

Here we get fussed if Tom Hawkins uses his phone to check the weather. American sport has been rocked in the last month or so by scandals in baseball and basketball: those of the Los Angeles Dodgers’s Shohei Ohtani, whose interpreter Ippei Mizuhara dug himself a $US4.5 million gambling hole, and Toronto Raptors’s Jontay Porter, who is alleged in grounds of injury to have ducked early season games in which multiple huge bets paid out.

It’s now just over five years since the International Cricket Council approved USA Cricket as the governing body for cricket in the United States, having binned the serially self-destructive USACA. Iain Higgins, formerly ICC’s chief operating officer, was its first CEO. The game has since then been in a fast burn phase, letting in money while the going is good and interest is high: all nine of the leagues listed by the FICA Leagues Hub are ‘approved’ by ICC, with no particular evidence of due diligence of their anti-corruption measures.

Cricket, of course, brings its own gambling heritage and culture. And everything we know of cricket malfeasance is that those most vulnerable to external inducements are those snatching for easy money in games of little significance in a period of heedless expansion - exactly the conditions that now pertain in cricket’s new favourite growth market. Periodically, to evidence that it’s paying some attention to the game’s integrity, the ICC’s will keel haul some hapless rube you’ve never heard of pour encourager les autres. But don’t be surprised if in a few years American cricket isn’t dealing with the same issues as are now besetting baseball and basketball, with a flow-on effect to the rest of a game where money is a matter of such cynicism and such naïveté.