You are facing the two-time Cy Young Award–winning Dodgers pitcher Blake Snell from a distance of twenty-two yards, armed only with a three-foot-long paddle and your own nerve. To enliven the proceedings, Snell interacts with you not from the traditional, essentially static position but after a twenty- or thirty-yard headlong sprint from the outfield to the pitcher’s mound, at the climax of which he hurls a cherry-red leather ball in the general direction of your ankles. In most cases, the ball will hit the turf, deviate sharply left or right, and rear up like a skipping rock somewhere toward your unprotected midriff.
For good measure, Snell will periodically vary the routine by dropping the ball in shorter, with the result that it bounces off the grass and bears in on your head. At your discretion, you may have equipped yourself with a device much like a motorcyclist’s helmet for the event. Other than avoiding serious injury, your primary job is to score runs—the currency of the game—by striking the ball to the field boundary, or far enough from the eleven fielders to allow you, the batter, to run to the other end of the twenty-two-yard infield before the ball can be returned. At least two bowlers, as they’re called, must take turns, from alternating ends; also, there are always two batters on the field, each to take a turn as required. When the entire batting team has been dismissed, either by committing one of various technical indiscretions or by being rendered hors de combat, the teams’ roles are reversed. After all the players required to bat on both sides have done so either once or twice, a ritual that can take from a few hours to as long as five days, the total number of runs accumulated determines the winner—unless time runs out first and the result is a draw.
There, in a nutshell, is cricket, which despite, or because of, its fabled idiosyncrasies remains the world’s second-most-popular spectator sport, after soccer. It’s perhaps worth adding just two further points before we move on. First, if nothing else, cricket has been around a long time. The game’s exact origins are a matter of scholarly debate, but it’s generally agreed that in the England of the mid-sixteenth century, the essential bat-ball duel at the heart of the proceedings had evolved far enough to be recognizable as the highly structured contest enjoyed in more than 100 countries today. And second, as the preceding passage perhaps shows, it is emphatically not a sport for the easily intimidated or the faint-hearted.
That’s not to say cricket is without its longueurs or pervasive eccentricities. Among other things, the sport has a marvelously weird lexicon, involving everything from a dibbly-dobbly (an unfruitful or wild pitch), to a googly (a delivery that after bouncing would normally swerve away from the batter instead swerves toward him), to a Nelson (a score of 111, possibly named because Admiral Horatio Nelson was thought to possess only one eye, one arm, and one leg—although, as a further quirk, Nelson actually had two legs).
At its heart, cricket stands as a wonderfully pastoral exercise in deferred gratification. Today, there are various forms of the sport around the world, but to most purists its true and highest expression lies in the international, or “test,” match, involving, say, England playing Australia or India facing Pakistan. Such encounters typically last five full days, with roughly eight hours of actual sport each day and the contestants communally decamping to a hotel each evening and returning to pick up where they left off the following morning. Twice a day, the same players leave the field and stroll back to the pavilion, or clubhouse, for a good meal, and on the warmer afternoons—rarely an issue during matches in England—a uniformed attendant will periodically appear on the field bearing a tray of assorted refreshments. Just to give you a sense of the essentially unhurried nature of the enterprise, a single batter can remain at his post for several hours, if not entire days, on end, and, if sufficiently skillful, accrue upwards of one hundred individual runs before being dismissed. In another of cricket’s cherished rituals, he can expect to be warmly applauded by his opponents on reaching such a milestone.
For decades, cricket’s ruling powers have dreamed of making it big in America, with some success. Today, there are some six thousand teams of varying skill in operation from coast to coast, with a list of names that combine, in somehow quintessentially American style, the patriotic (Washington Freedom), the ecological (Seattle Orcas), and the gung ho (Texas Super Kings). In June 2024, the US national team defied expectations by beating their heavily favored opponents, Pakistan, in a round of the T20 (or shorter-form) World Cup tournament held at the 7,200-seat Grand Prairie Stadium, near Dallas. Readers familiar with the USA’s shocking ice hockey victory over the Soviet Union in the 1980 Winter Olympics need only think of that same sensation, but transferred to a sunbaked Texan sports arena, to get some of the flavor.
It’s been said that cricket got off to a slow start in the United States largely because it smacks of Britain’s imperial past, with its starchy social etiquette and underlying note of hauteur on the part of the white man to his less fortunate colonial opponents. Such attitudes are inimical to the spirit of American rebelliousness and egalitarianism, the theory goes.
Set against this, there’s the fact that cricket was already widely popular in the United States of the mid-nineteenth century. There were dozens of thriving cricket clubs along the eastern seaboard of that time. The first recognizable international match in the game’s history took place between the US and Canadian teams, in September 1844, at the St. George’s Club (so named because of England’s patron saint) on ground now occupied by the Gilsey House apartment complex in midtown Manhattan. Twenty-two thousand spectators attended all or part of the proceedings, which the visitors won after three days’ play.
Cultural historians have never quite agreed when or why cricket’s first American boom ended as it did. Baseball was clearly one factor. Its demands were simpler, for all it needed was “a bat, a ball, and four gunnysacks thrown on a patch of ground,” in the words of the popular 1860 publication Beadle’s Dime Base-Ball Player. Soldiers on both sides in the Civil War played ad hoc baseball games in the lulls between military engagements. Circumstances, if not temperament, meant that they would be less inclined to devote an entire week to a match staged on a field that ideally needs meticulous preparation, contested by men wearing starched all-white uniforms. In retrospect, cricket never stood a chance amid the burst of restless energy and national reinvention that characterized America’s Gilded Age of the 1870s. Others must judge whether the rapid promotion of baseball as the nation’s summer pastime was a step up, or down, the sporting evolutionary ladder.
Cricket’s recent revival from behind its marble slab in the United States owes much to a new generation of enthusiasts settling here largely from the Indian subcontinent. As Jack Surendranath, the venerable chairman of Seattle Cricket Club, says: “There was a huge boom in the game here after India won the World Cup tournament in 1983. Suddenly, you had youngsters running around town who wanted to be [the Indian stars] Sunil Gavaskar or Kapil Dev. At that same time, the big high-tech companies were recruiting more and more people from South Asia. So it’s really been on a roll again since then.” Other observers have remarked on the beneficial effects of cricket reaching out from its fanatical immigrant fan base to bring its key life lessons about the values of teamwork, respect, and sportsmanship to a host culture that, it would seem, so badly needs them.
Cricket is surely the perfect corrective for a TikTok generation characterized by its need for instant gratification and its ever shorter attention span. At least as enacted in its longer form, it’s a sport that demands patience and perseverance. Imagine a single continuing contest where you leave the field on a Monday evening feeling mildly apprehensive about your team’s prospects, but then return to see a collective rallying of spirits by Wednesday afternoon, leading to an ultimate moment of fulfillment the following Friday lunchtime. That’s an international test match for you. Life itself can be measured out by the ebb and flow of such an event, and by the manner in which we, whether as players or spectators, react to it. Cricket can be a hard, and sometimes even quite a thrilling, affair. But it is also a game of profound thought, whose appeal doesn’t necessarily rely on a fixation with winning, and, as such, it is a thing of deep beauty in our presently debased world.
For all that, can cricket ever truly appeal to the traditional American sports fan, with his or her affinity for the more gladiatorial sort of contest? Might the public grow to appreciate the finer points of a batter declining to swing at a marginally off-target pitch, remaining serenely in place to await the next scoring opportunity? Will they learn to thrill to the nuances of a single game extended over the best part of a week, with hotel and meal breaks as a scheduled part of the proceedings? Or to gently lament, as millions of cricket fans in Britain have done over the years, the familiar sight of the two teams leaving the field because of intermittent drizzle or poor light? Is there something in the American sports-watching psyche attuned to, say, football’s strange combination of brute force and technical pedantry that might find cricket’s tendency to drift along, untroubled by any umpire’s intervention, for hours on end, just a touch too easygoing for their tastes? Might that same American fan struggle to accept that two teams could ultimately decide that neither one of them is the victor in a given contest and call the whole thing off, with a handshake and a “Well played, sir,” as a draw?
Cricket teaches us those virtues of patience, endurance, and magnanimity that give the sport a wider dominion in life than any mere obsession with individual statistics or results. Whether a public bred on our mainstream American sports can accommodate itself to such values should make for a fascinating spectacle in the years ahead.