Cricket: "American" Enough for an American Audience?

Fine leg, sweeper, and silly mid-on are not descriptors of someone’s appendage, a new type of Swiffer or someone who is acting irresponsibly during a midlife crisis respectively. Rather they are fielding positions in a game of cricket. Cricket is the second most popular sport in the world (behind soccer), even though it has not made many inroads into American popular culture. So, it might surprise many that this year the United States co-hosted the men’s T20 Cricket World Cup with some of the Caribbean nations. Not only did the United States field a team for the first time in a World Cup, but the team did very well to advance to the second round of competition featuring the 8 best teams in the world.??

It is not my intention to explain the game of cricket or provide commentary on the U.S. men’s cricket team’s performance at the World Cup. Other experts of the game can do that better. The scope of this piece is to examine what cricket means to a U.S. audience, and the nature of conversation surrounding the composition of the U.S. men’s National Cricket team.?

Cricket originated in England and spread amongst many of its colonies during the height of the British Empire. Australia and India are current cricketing superpowers who took to the game early on and have since innovated their way to elite levels of play. Other Indian subcontinental countries, African countries, and Caribbean countries were early adopters of the game with some European countries as more recent entrants. Notably absent until the turn of the century were the United States and Canada. Perhaps America’s absence is an intentional spurning of all that is British (calling petroleum “gas” when it is decidedly not gaseous, or the metric system which is infinitely more usable and logical), or perhaps the U.S. audience didn’t have the attention span to watch a 5-day or 1-day long sporting competition. It remains that in both soccer and cricket, two truly global sports, America was noticeably absent for a long time. Perhaps this might explain why U.S. Sprinter Noah Lyles quizzically inquired “World champions of what?” when winners of the NBA, NFL, and MLB league champions are crowned world champions. To the critical eye, there is a tinge of ethnocentrism in claiming global superiority, when it is not really a global arena.???

Cricket however is a global sport, and the United States has finally arrived… or has it? A casual scroll through TikTok (CricTok?) might have you stumbling on some interesting (and xenophobic) content, questioning if the United States Team is made up of Americans or Indian, Indian sub-continental, and Caribbean immigrants. Implicit in that question is an argument that immigrants are not Americans.??

The U.S. Men’s National Cricket team is made up of immigrants and first-generation Americans. Many of them are not professional cricketers and have other sources of income to sustain their lives, unlike many of the global cricketing athletes who have exclusive contracts with their national cricketing administration. Many of them speak with pride about representing the United States in the global arena at the highest levels of competition. However, if you weren’t moving in immigrant communities you could have completely missed all of this. None of the major networks covered the World Cup tournament; ESPN occasionally made mention of a “Top-play” at the tournament; and World Cup host stadiums in New York, Texas, and Florida were largely packed with immigrant communities. What might explain America’s hesitation to mainstream a global sport???

Turn on any television channel and the narrative of American global superiority is evident. Superheroes draped in red, white, and blue save the world; American presidents lead the charge against alien invaders (there is a dark irony in this depiction); and NBA and NFL league champions are crowned “world champions.” The U.S. Men’s National cricket team departs from this narrative. Yes, they made it to the second round of competition, but they are not a global superpower. And the people who are propelling the team to success don’t look “American” (read as white) and they do not have names that slip easily off the tongue for most Americans (see if you can pronounce Saurabh Netravalkar correctly without hurting your tongue… and then Google his story).??

But perhaps most importantly, the group of immigrants draped in red, white, and blue representing the United States at the Men’s Cricket World Cup, invite us to fundamentally re-think what it means to be American.

Perhaps America isn’t ready for that conversation.?