US Cricket: Perception, Reality & Possibility

The history of United States cricket begins in the 18th century. Among first Americans, cricket was as popular a bat and ball game as baseball. American people consider Baseball as an American sport with a long and illustrious history, but cricket predates it.  In fact, cricket was being played here before it became the United States, and historical records as early as 1737 have chronicled its existence. The United States participated in the first international cricket match, which saw St George's Cricket Club play Canada on September 24, 1844, at the former Bloomingdale Park in Manhattan. Approximately 10,000 spectators attended the match. It is today "the longest international rivalry in cricket, in fact in any sport."

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Though Americans never played cricket in significant numbers, the game grew for some time. Around the date of the United States Civil War, the game began competing with baseball for participants, but then slowly declined in popularity. It was followed again by a brief golden age with the Philadelphian cricket team. It lasted until roughly the start of World War I, at this time cricket again became less popular. In the latter part of the 20th-century immigrants from cricket playing nations in South Asia and the West Indies helped spark a resurgence in the game's popularity. It led to participation and success in several International Cricket Council events.

Perception: During summer Every weekend from April through September engineers, chefs, postdoctoral fellows, taxi drivers, and paper-pulp moguls gather at Fort Dent to play and talk cricket. Their conversations, as often as not, turn to the prospect of converting cricket into an American game. Most Americans view cricket as quintessentially, unfathomably English -- less a sport than an unusual kind of picnic, and as baffling as wallpaper on the ceiling and "spotted dick" on dessert menus. But cricket is no longer mainly English. For one thing, the English are no longer so very good at it: they currently rank a wretched eighth out of nine among the major cricket-playing nations. Cricket's epicenter has shifted decisively from England to South Asia. Now enterprising South Asian immigrants are eager to make the United States a force in world cricket. In the four cricket-besotted nations of South Asia -- Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh -- the sport knows no equal as a repository of virulent patriotism.

Reality:  

Possibility: Seeing cricket, lots of it, on TV. Not just pay-per-view, like now." The kids should be playing the game every minute, everywhere, they can see cricket wherever it is being played in the world, nonstop on television.