By Rohan Chandran

Many years ago, I was a college freshman, watching Pakistan take on the West Indies in an ODI (1990s Tip: Make friends with the guy who controls the University C-band satellite dish).  A dorm-mate of mine was passing through the room just as the screen showed Desmond Haynes’ 8,000+ runs in ODI cricket. Cue complete shock and awe – that one person could score that many runs. He sat down and watched the remainder of that game, and several games thereafter.

Cricket can indeed garner an audience, even here in America. There is, of course, much that we must do to improve the standard of our game, but in parallel there is much that we can do to make it attractive, and that is what we focus on here.

1. Think Long Term and put Cricket First.

Short term thinking and ego-fuelled self-aggrandizement are not only detrimental to the quality of our cricket, but also restricting our ability to popularize the game.  We’re all better than each other, and busy looking for our own little glories, instead of thinking about the game and its longevity.

How many people want to spend their free time following that?

For people to invest their time, effort and emotion in following a sport, whether it is as a casual fan or a fanatic, they need to reasonably expect some return on their investment. Being a fan is not a one-night stand, it’s a lifelong commitment. For cricket to earn that commitment from people, it has to make that commitment itself.

Soccer is still working to make it in this country, and it’s taken 50 years of concerted effort to get this far. If we keep looking for quick fixes and plump for short-sighted solutions, at best we’ll have a few false dawns (think Pro Cricket or MLC of a few years ago). Soccer learned from its mistakes, and took a long-term approach, starting with fundamentals. It’s working for them, and we would do well to borrow from their experience.

So what should we do?

2. Get into Schools – It’s about the kids.

The US Rugby team consistently makes it to the Rugby World Cup, and will be there once again in 2011. The team is currently ranked 16th in the world, and has been around the top 15 for years.

How many rugby fans do you know? How popular is rugby in America? Your likely answers are “none”, and “not very”. Will qualifying for a cricket World Cup (T20 or ODI) have a different outcome?

Rugby has recognized that their biggest problem is that their sport is only picked up in college, at the earliest, where it serves a niche interest, but also as a fallback for those who don’t play other varsity sports. Cricket is even worse off, played by people in their twenties, thirties and forties. It exists as, and is perceived as, a recreational pastime for those who hail from other lands.

Rugby is pushing hard to get into high schools and to involve kids at an earlier age, and that is something cricket needs to do in a big way if it is looking to create any sort of a broad base for the future. Start where you have a cricket friendly population, and expand from there. It’s okay to be the fallback sport for those who don’t make the cut in the big ones. It’s okay if it’s immigrants and the children of immigrants who are your first takers.

3. Develop cricketers properly.

We only have to look at our recent national squads, in order to glimpse another fundamental problem. The senior squad Is comprised of thirty-somethings (with just a couple of exceptions).  But age is not the enemy, cricketing roots are.

We have failed to develop players locally, and so boys who play in our U19 squads, and perform at that level, disappear without a trace. At the senior level, in come players who learned and developed their game elsewhere, and are now in the US for non-cricketing reasons.

We do nothing to take the children who show real talent and promise in the 14-18 age group, and develop them into cricketers for our future.  These are the boys who have to break into our national team so that finally, we have home grown talent to support.

They don’t have to be white Americans, they don’t have to even be American born, but until we create an environment in which someone can learn or develop their game here, and then make it to the highest level available to them (the US senior team), there will be little that’s American about our cricket team, and therefore little that will appeal to anyone outside the cricket playing fraternity.

4. Marketing – Kill the politics, and give people a hook.

If you want any sort of broad based appeal, then you need to make an effort to market the game, and in order to do that, the game has to be marketable to its potential audience.

First and foremost, nobody has time for the politics and shenanigans that plague US cricket today.  Look at baseball in the mid-90s, and if you doubt me, ask the Montreal Expos who were having their best ever season, lost all their fans and are now the Washington Nationals. Clean up our act in cricket, and then we at least give ourselves something that we can market without embarrassment.

Then follows the question of how we market it. We need to look at what resonates with the target audience – the sort of things they might connect with.

• Collegiate Sports – For Americans, loyalty to their undergraduate alma mater is lifelong. Pride in your college or university is a big deal, and following and supporting its sports teams are a core part of that. At Stanford, I was routinely asked about how we did in the cricket Pac-10, and there was even excitement about the cricket Big Game against Cal.

Unfortunately, the cricket Pac-10 did not exist, and Berkeley no longer play in the local league. There are some commendable efforts going on to create regional and national inter-collegiate competition.  If we can make this a reality, it will be another big step forward in giving us a shot at being a popular game.

• Statistics – Follow the example of the baseball boxscore. Be creative, and realize that the game may need to be marketed a little differently in a country which doesn’t have the sport sewn into its fabric. Cricket lends itself to numbers in a way that perhaps no other sport does – so embrace that.

• Quality – At the end of the day, you need to provide a certain level of quality to get mass appeal. Loyalty and fandom is either born out of geography, or the attractiveness of a winning habit. What I’m really saying is that we need to do all the basic things that would appear in the “5 ways to improve the standard of cricket in America” article – around our infrastructure (tangible and intangible), administration, coaching, selection processes, and just basic understanding of what the game is about at a higher level.  White balls and colored clothing are not the solution if it’s sustainable interest that we are looking to foster. A quality product needs to come first.

5. Realistic Objectives.

So with all of that in mind, we come to what might be a controversial point. Who are the “Americans” we’re trying to take the game to, and what does it mean to create mass appeal and a national scale audience?

Here I contend that we are fools if we think we can in any way supplant or even exist at the same level as the major American sports. It isn’t going to happen. Cricket is not made in the USA. You either have to change cricket, make it an American sport, and then give it a shot; or you have to think realistically about what cricket’s potential place in the order is. Baseball took care of option 1, so we’re working with option 2.

We need to avoid using “American” as a euphemism for “35 year old white male from middle America.” We’re not trying to sell prime time television advertising, and that person is not, and likely never will be our audience.

Instead, we need to understand and accept that for the game of cricket as we know it (and as it evolves globally), the “American” we can go after is possibly an immigrant, or the child of immigrant parents. That’s not a bad thing – it describes a node in most family trees. If cricket can start capturing the children of immigrants first, it then has a shot at their children, and each subsequent generation on an increasingly broad scale. So rather than delude ourselves, let’s go after what we can really get.

Now that doesn’t mean we can’t and won’t attract anyone else – I think if we taken all of the above suggestions, and those made by others in this series, we will attract many fans outside that base as well. But that is where the core has to initially come from – they are the messiahs who will spread the word, as it were.