The T20 World Cup and Major League Cricket is coming to America but the sport once brought Bloods and Crips together in South Central LA, writes James Day.
It means swapping home runs for sixes and fuck knows what the Yanks will make of having just ‘two bases’, but cricket is coming to America.
Jos Buttler and co. come to town in June as Florida, New York and Texas host World Cup matches alongside six venues in the West Indies. The USA will also compete. Then, with new stadiums, stars like Ricky Ponting, and franchises backed by wealthy investors, the domestic T20 tournament kicks off on the 4th of July – Independence Day. But the invasion isn’t just provoking patriots by challenging the status quo of baseball, basketball, football and hockey, it also faces fierce opposition from residents’ associations fearing an influx of cricket hooligans.
That’s not cricket, of course, but try telling locals in Oswego, Illinois, facing the prospect of a 25,000-seater stadium being built on their doorstep. “Can you imagine having professional meetings with CEOs of Fortune 500 companies with construction sounds, cheering, and announcements going on in the background?” resident Dawn DeRosa told a recent village meeting. “We would have strangers walking through our yards, urinating in our pond and throwing up in our flowerbeds.”
The Hindi city
“Cricket is not popular in America, very few know anything about it, however, over the past three years we’ve had multiple developers reach out about building a stadium,” Oswego village administrator, Daniel Di Santo, tells Loaded. “Our congresswoman is Lauren Underwood, so we gave her staff a tour of where the stadium would go and the response was: ‘Do you mean the insects or the sport?’.”
Small town Oswego is 40 miles west of Chicago and home to just 36,000 people. However, it’s the fastest-growing area in the state with a sizable Indian-American population and a glut of land ripe for development. Around a year ago, Oswego resident and owner of Breybourne Cricket Club, Paresh Patel, acquired the land to build a stadium and his timing couldn’t have been better. Within weeks the IOC announced cricket would return to the Olympics for the first time since 1900 at the 2028 LA Games. Then, Major League Cricket confirmed it was looking for a Chicago-area franchise. Finally, the Illinois General Assembly passed a resolution encouraging high schools to include cricket as an official sport.
“If you’d called me a year ago I wouldn’t have believed any of it,” says Di Santo, aged 42, whose exposure to the world’s second most popular sport extends to “watching a few YouTube videos”. Now it’s hoped the planned stadium – with two restaurants and a hotel – will qualify for international cricket, meaning England could one day visit. “The belief is there is real money in having a stadium big enough to attract international stars,” adds Di Santo. “The opposition comes from the proposed stadium being built next door to a residential neighbourhood. Most sports have hooligans – American football gets rowdy – but Paresh has told us cricket is a gentleman’s sport.”
The D.C. universe
Washington Freedom is one of Major League Cricket’s founding franchises, and just as Wayne Rooney was drawn to D.C. in Major League Soccer, now another sour-faced former pro has arrived chasing the Yankee dollar – ex-Aussie skipper, Ricky Ponting.
The money man behind the team is Indian-American businessman, Sanjay Govil. Reported net worth: USD$ 1.8 billion. “Ricky’s international stardom brings with it a global audience, as his fans will be following his success in the United States,” Govil tells Loaded, admitting he is relying on “pockets of strong expat support” to fill a planned 12,000-seater stadium. “While it's challenging to predict exact numbers, we anticipate a significant turnout once we have a D.C.-area presence and facilities.”
More ambitious is a belief cricket can pull fans across from a sport as American as peanut butter, jelly and fentanyl. “There is a natural and fundamental overlap between cricket and baseball,” says Govil. “The concept of pitchers, catchers, batters, and runs, will help fans pick up the sport. While the terminology may be different, many of the basic concepts are the same.”
As for the fear of hooligans in ‘Make Cricket Great Again’ hats marching on Capitol Hill, Govil adds: “Like any other sport, we’re committed to maintaining a respectful, sportsman-like culture that values safety and good spirits in equal measure.”
Straight bat outta Compton
The US isn’t a total stranger to cricket. In the early 1900s, Bart King from Philadelphia once led the first-class bowling averages in England. Then, in 1996, Compton Cricket Club was formed in South Central LA. The social experiment to get Bloods and Crips to hold hands even went on to tour Australia and the UK, meeting role models such as Brian Lara, Mo Mowlam and, er, Gerry Adams, along the way.
Former England cricketer, Paul Smith, was eventually tasked with teaching this motley crew of gang members in, how shall we put this, challenging conditions. “I was contacted by Katie Haber [MBE, producer on Blade Runner and Straw Dogs, plus BAFTA co-founder], and movie director Sam Peckinpah [The Wild Bunch], who were trying to get a team off the ground in Compton – pretty much gangland central,” Smith, now aged 60, tells Loaded. “They had Latino kids, Hispanic, black American, Mexican, and one white kid called Josh. We tried to get them interested in a sport they’d never heard of before, with no funding, and a park in Compton isn’t always the friendliest of places… it’s not exactly Lord’s.
“Compton was notorious for drive-by shootings and people would carry guns like we carry mobile phones. We tried to introduce the game into South Central and Inglewood, areas notorious for rioting, and what you and I class as anti-social behaviour in the UK would be a walk in the park in Compton. I remember standing in the middle of the pitch while people were trying to shoot down a police helicopter. Danger would always be close and if someone saw you put cricket equipment into a vehicle, you were better off leaving it outside, because carjacking was rife.”
Smith believes the initiative was “100% groundbreaking and zero-funded” despite desperate pleas to the White House and even Downing Street to fund it. “We wrote to the President, but asking for cricket funding in America in the 90s, you’ve got little chance. Hip hop was seen as the antichrist, but UK kids were hugely influenced by gangster rap. So the idea was to get youngsters from Compton to give talks in some of the more crime-ridden areas of the UK, but also play cricket. We wrote to the Prime Minister and the International Cricket Council but we never got a jot.
“These kids were affiliated with the Bloods, the Crips… many different gangs in many different areas where you wouldn’t cross the street because one side was controlled by one gang and the other side by another. Kids s*** scared to walk in their own parish and a drama for parents waiting for their kids to make it home from school alive. The stakes were high, and being from one part of town was enough to get you dealt with. Enough kids were getting shot dead for you to quickly realise what the consequences were.”
Smith says the team, also known as the ‘Homies and POPz’ or ‘The Compton Homies’, was also formed from homeless people living in Dome Village, a now dismantled tented community on the edge of Skid Row. “Picture huge amounts of drug addiction to substances people in this country haven’t even heard of,” he adds. “It brought people together from all walks of life where there was an undercurrent of danger. Some had been shot, some had seen things you and I wouldn’t want to witness, and most had friends laid to rest in Inglewood Cemetary.”
What about Major League Cricket? Smith has views. “I remember Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath and Brian Lara playing in LA, Houston and New York in 2015 and despite three massive stadiums in three major cities, nobody went. With the greatest respect, 99% of Americans didn’t know who the hell they were,” says Smith. “Judge American cricket in 10 years on how many are playing the sport. You can build stadiums, but what the legacy is I do not know.”
As for the similarities with baseball? “Baseballs are pitched in the perfect area for a cricket bat, whereas in cricket the ball can be coming for your head at 90mph. If you did that in baseball both teams would gather in the middle of the field for a fight. So what I’m saying is baseball’s a pussy sport, cricket’s a sport for men. And it’s not a ‘world series’ either.”