Guest blog post by Jacquelyn DeSanti

Three o’ clock on a Tuesday morning in January and the streets of New York City are quiet and empty. Businesses are closed, their grates pulled down, rats scurry around looking for food in the chilly winter. It is below freezing outside. However, down in Little Italy, a small bar called Eight Mile Creek is lit up. People are still walking in and the sounds are rowdy. Somewhere inside a man yells, “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!” a common Australian sporting chant. Tonight, it is being yelled for the Australian cricket team as they take on India on the first day out of five that they will play.

New York City cricket fans come out from all around the city and can be found in the bars at strange hours of the night watching matches being played in sunnier parts of the world. They are a devoted group. For the most part, they have to work hard to find the cricket, as only a handful of places pay for the satellite to air it, usually the bars owned by cricketing nation expatriates.

Cricket, a game that originated in England, is one of the most popular sports in the world but it gets little to no attention in the United States. The major cricketing nations are India, Pakistan, Australia, England, Sri Lanka, the West Indies, South Africa, and New Zealand.

Americans have never understood cricket. One of the things that baffles Americans about cricket, those that have heard of the sport that is, is the idea that it is a game that lasts for five days and could still end in a tie. There are certain characteristics of the sport that don’t sit well with Americans and our need for over-the-top, “the bigger the better”-type theatrics in sport. For instance, in test cricket, all of the players on both teams wear all white uniforms. This tradition is said to suggest that there are no outside judgments once you walk out onto the field. No matter what your class, country, or color everyone is given a fair and equal shot.

The most common question Americans ask is, Isn’t it like baseball? There are similarities, like the fact that you swing a bat to hit a ball being thrown at you in order to score runs, but really, baseball is the adolescent cousin of cricket. Baseball was developed out of cricket for those who prefer a short and easy to understand sport, for people hungry for instant gratification. Cricket requires patience and strategy.

Cricket is played on what is known as an “oval.” In the center of the oval is the pitch, a rectangular bit of ground, which has been pressed by a heavy roller, and it is here that the majority of the action is played out. Batmen hit with a flat, rectangular bat that helps with controlling the shot. In baseball, most batters just want to get a hit, and even better a home run, but in cricket there are many options and strategies for hitting the ball – including hitting it behind you. Bowlers, who would be the equivalent to pitchers in baseball, must maintain a straight arm in the delivery of each ball; and the ball, in the desired case, will bounce once before reaching the batsman.

In New York, you have to know where to go and who to talk to if you want to get involved either playing or watching. It does not often make headlines. “Cricket in New York is divided. Although there is a lot of it being played, it is not spreading out of its respective neighborhoods,” says Gokul Chakravarthy, an Indian who moved to the United States in 2001 and has been playing and umpiring in small pick-up leagues, on mostly all Indian teams. Chakravarthy believes cricket isn’t growing any bigger though because the different ethnic groups, mainly Indians, Pakistanis, and West Indians, aren’t mixing and there isn’t a lot of cross promotion. It is being played in the same isolated areas and the people in those neighborhoods are not associating with any other groups.

Although it has not been successful yet at breaking into the mainstream, the game is being passed down to the first- and second-generation American children and is now actually quite popular with young kids born from the parents of cricketing nations, and that love spreads within schools. Recently, a handful of New York City high schools began offering cricket as an after-school sport, where they will compete in a league. There are even cricket clubs in many of New York’s universities. Columbia has one, as do two of the senior CUNY schools, City College and Queens College.

Iqbal Mahamud, a recent City College graduate and founder of the CCNY Cricket Club, is very active in the cricket scene in New York. Originally from Bangladesh, Mahamud and his family moved to New York in 1999. “I knew that cricket wasn’t popular in this country. I gathered my friends and formed a team. We played in the street,” he said. When he learned that there was a Bangladesh cricket league that played in his neighborhood, he took his team and played there. When his team joined the league there were only six teams, now there are twenty teams and it is the strongest and most competitive cricket league in New York.

But even with this strong cricketing population in New York, what is the future of cricket in the United States? Many who love the sport and live here believe that it will never catch on and grow to be what it is in their home countries. We will have to wait and see. For now, those who love the game will have continue to gather in tightly packed bars to watch their countries play it out on faraway shores.