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A towering stadium with 34,000 seats and a soft, precisely-formed Kentucky bluegrass field is being built in a park outside New York and will host the world’s top cricket tournament next month.
But on a recent Saturday morning on the other side of Eisenhower Park on Long Island, budding young cricketers were already busy batting, bowling and fielding on makeshift pitches.
The T20 World Cup will be the first major international cricket tournament in the United States, but the centuries-old game of cricket in England, driven by a steady wave of immigration from South Asia and the Caribbean, will be played in the far reaches of the New York metropolitan area. It has thrived for years in a remote corner. Every spring, parks from the Bronx to Queens to Long Island to New Jersey come alive with recreational leagues that hold competitions over the weekend.
U.S. cricket organizers say June’s tournament will take the sport’s popularity to the next level, attracting generations and cultures like the one soccer enjoyed when the U.S. first hosted the FIFA World Cup in 1994. We hope that this will provide lasting support beyond the current level. On Wednesday, former Olympic sprinter Usain Bolt, an honorary ambassador for the T20 World Cup, toured the nearly completed Eisenhower Stadium with members of the U.S. cricket team and former New York football and basketball greats. visited.
Parmanand Sarju, founder of the Long Island Youth Cricket Academy, which hosted Saturday’s practice, said he “couldn’t be happier” to see a new stadium built above the ballpark where his youth academy started. , said this shows how far things have come.
“When we started more than 10 years ago, there was no understanding of cricket, at least at the youth level,” said the academy, who started the academy to teach his two American-born children the sport they grew up with in Guyana. said the Merrick resident. In South America. “Now they’re building a stadium here.”
The sport originally took root in New York City’s outer boroughs, but as it has for generations, immigrant families are moving to the suburbs and bringing change to their communities, said Ahmad Chohan, a Pakistani-born New York City police chief. It is said that it gradually spread over time. A cricket club also plays in Eisenhower as part of a statewide league with approximately 70 teams.
The World Cup is a “historic moment”, he said.
Cricket is the second most watched sport in the world after soccer, and Indian star Virat Kohli has 268 million followers on Instagram, but according to USA Cricket, which oversees cricket, is played by more than 200,000 Americans across more than 400 local leagues nationwide. Men’s national cricket team.
Major League Cricket launched in the United States last year with six professional T20 teams, including a New York franchise, which currently plays some matches at stadiums in the Dallas area, which also hosts World Cup matches. There is.
USA Cricket president Venu Pithike believes the T20 World Cup, the first time the U.S. will play the tournament, will be a turning point.
The sport is one of the events scheduled for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, making it the first time the sport will appear at an Olympics in more than a century, he said. The sport’s governing body, the International Cricket Council, is also committed to growing the U.S. market.
“Cricket is mainly seen as a foreign sport, but I think that will change a lot in the next 10 to 20 years,” Pischke said. “Americans will definitely think and approach differently when it comes to developing cricket.”
The Los Angeles match and the upcoming World Cup, which the United States will co-host with the West Indies, will both feature modern versions of matches known as “Twenty20,” lasting about three hours and highlighted by attacks by aggressive batsmen. Become. “Six” is like a home run. It is generally considered more approachable to casual fans than traditional formats, which can last one to five days, where the batter takes a more measured approach. Twenty20 is the format used in the hugely popular Indian Premier League.
Eisenhower Park hosts half of the games played in the United States, including the headline showdown between cricketing powerhouses Pakistan and India on June 9th.
Other matches in the 55-match tournament featuring 20 countries, which begins on June 1, will be played at existing cricket grounds in Texas and Florida. Subsequent rounds will be held in Antigua, Trinidad and other Caribbean countries, with the final to be held in Barbados on June 29th.
Cricket has a long history in the United States, especially in New York.
The sport was played by the American military during the Revolutionary War, and the first international match was held in 1844 between St. George’s Cricket Club in Manhattan and Canada, said Philadelphia-area cricket historian Stephen Holroyd. That’s what it means.
In 1855, New York newspapers still focused more on reporting on cricket than on baseball, but the sport remained stubbornly insular, with British-only cricket appearing just as baseball was reaching its peak. He said the clubs were hindering the growth of cricket.
By the end of World War I, cricket had all but disappeared, but immigrants from India and other former British colonies revived it about half a century later.
Anubhav Chopra is a co-founder of the Long Island Premier League, a 15-year-old men’s league that plays in separate local parks and is one of more than 700,000 Indian Americans living in the New York City area. This is by far the largest community. It’s that kind of thing in this country.
The Babylon resident has never been to a professional cricket match, but he shared his love of cricket growing up in New Delhi with his three American children, including his nine-year-old son, who takes cricket lessons. I’m trying to share.
Mr. Chopra has purchased tickets for all nine games at Eisenhower and plans to take his wife, children and grandparents to the June 3 game between Sri Lanka and South Africa.
“Cricket is life for me,” he said. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
The dense grid of metal rods and wooden planks that make up Eisenhower’s modular stadium will be removed immediately after the cup games, but the cricket field will remain, except for the central rectangular surface known as the pitch.
Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman said what is left will create a “world-class” foundation for the local cricket team and possibly become the home of a professional team in the future.
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Follow Phillip Marcelo at twitter.com/philmarcelo.