To those who run cricket in the United States:
I hear you’re planning to start a Twenty20 league here in the USA, next year, and I know you’re wondering how you can get Americans that aren’t cricket fans to pay attention. In an interview with Bloomberg, Cricket Holdings America chief executive Neil Maxwell said, “The way we’re taking it into the United States is as more of an entertainment product than a sport. I think we’re going to compete more with cinema than we are with baseball.”
To use a term common to both baseball and cricket: that’s a swing and a miss.
Of course you’re going to compete more with baseball than you are with cinema, and any suggestion otherwise is ludicrous. Cricket is a sport, and will be seen as a sport by every American fan. There is simply no method you can use to sell cricket as anything other than a sport. (Unless you’re willing to fix matches for dramatic purposes. In that case, all you have to do is outshine professional wrestling.)
Luckily for you, there’s a fairly clear pathway to the American sports consciousness. It’s the way that soccer has become the fifth major sport in America. It’s the way that cycling has become part of the national consciousness; it’s the way that the motley collection of sports on the Olympic program become, once every four years, the most popular thing in America, bar none. It’s deviously simple, and what’s more, it fits perfectly with the way that cricket works in the world today.
It’s so easy: give us a team to cheer for.
The US men’s and women’s national teams, in soccer, are where most American soccer fans got their start. Virtually every American who’s ever watched the Tour de France started by checking out Greg LeMond or Lance Armstrong. Countless Olympic athletes – Carl Lewis, Michael Phelps,Shawn Johnson – became household names in America despite playing sports that have virtually no day-to-day presence in the American sporting consciousness.
Give us an American team to cheer for and we’ll be there. Even if we know nothing about the sport in question. Even if we don’t care most of the rest of the time. The most-watched soccer game in ESPN history is not a Premier League game or an MLS game or even a men’s national team game; it’s the 2011 Women’s World Cup final. Do you think most of the people who watched that game tuned in for any other reason than to cheer on their country?
More to the point, do you think any of them tuned in because it was an alternative to the cinema?
Give us an American team. When international cricket pops up on ESPN3, we need to see the USA in the mix. On the rare occasion SportsCenter shows cricket highlights, it needs to be Sushil Nadkarni and company that are shown. When a kid plays cricket in gym class because of Jamie Harrison, that kid needs to be able to pretend to be Steven Taylor, not Chris Gayle or Virat Kohli.
You can start as many cricket leagues as you want, but in the end, if you want American fans to get interested, you want Team USA involved. Calling the teams “New York” and “San Francisco” isn’t the cure; most of us don’t live in New York or San Francisco, just like most of us don’t live in Dehli or Sydney and therefore don’t tune in for the Daredevils vs. the Sixers.
Forget cricket vs. baseball. Forget cricket vs. cinema. What American sports fans really want is simple: Team USA vs. the world.
