Cricket comes to Sacramento: Startup league brings professional talent and big dreams

Cricket, a bat-and-ball game that has long been sidelined in the United States, is seeking a place in American culture. Some of the sport’s most passionate proponents have hatched a multi-step plan to popularize cricket here, and the effort is largely based in the Bay Area.

The people behind Major League Cricket plan to recruit experienced players from abroad, develop local talent, draw in fans through a minor league and eventually launch the country’s most-ambitious professional cricket league. They claim to have over a $1 billion to invest in the effort.

Leading the charge in the Sacramento area is Nirav Shah, a longtime cricket fanatic who fell in love with the game during his childhood in India and has championed the sport in Davis for 20 years. Now, Shah serves as general manager of the minor league Davis-based Golden State Grizzlies.

“In India, cricket is more like a religion,” explained Shah. “You’d see boys, girls, everyone interested in cricket and watching as well as playing, so the same thing was inculcated in me as well.”

Shah says local tournaments have drawn 50 to 60 teams; Sacramento alone has an 18-team cricket association, and the Bay Area is home to two minor league teams — the East Bay Blades and the Silicon Valley Strikers — that play an essential role in the cricket popularization master plan.

The minor league launched July 31, with 200 matches planned over 10 weekends. Four hundred cricketers from 21 cities on 27 teams are participating.

In addition to laying the groundwork for the eventual major league, the minor league is “by far the most extensive cricket competition to ever take place in the U.S.,” league spokesman Tom Dunmore said. “It’s a significant step in creating a structure of regular high quality competition for cricketers in America.”

Dunmore hopes to use the minor league to build a fan base in the United States, and strategically develop American-grown talent. Though teams make an effort to include locals, Shah said that most recruit three or four professional players from places where the sport already has a foothold — cricketers like Sami Aslam, who played on the national team in his home country of Pakistan for several years before moving to the U.S. to join the Grizzlies.

“There was a really good opportunity in the USA as they were recruiting players from all over the world,” Aslam said. “They gave me a three-year contract.”

As a fundamental aspect of Major League Cricket’s strategy, each team is required to include a number of under-19 and under-21 players, who coaches hope will learn from their more-seasoned teammates.

The league has collaborated extensively with USA Cricket, a nonprofit corporation that manages the national team and aims to “facilitate the governance, regulation, development and promotion of cricket in the USA.”

A core part of the plan to integrate cricket into the American athletic landscape is sparking love for the sport in young players. To do so, Major League Cricket and USA Cricket have invested heavily in youth programming. Just like the minor league, this effort relies heavily on the incorporation of international talent: many professional players from abroad, Shah said, have “been given contracts to be coaches for young kids who were born and raised in America to create our own homegrown talent.”

Getting a country to fall in love with an unfamiliar sport is a difficult venture, and there have been plenty of road bumps along the way.

The pandemic posed a unique challenge to the minor league, which not only had to reckon with social-distancing mandates but also thorny travel restrictions that kept out many of the foreign-born professional athletes desperately needed by domestic teams.

Beyond the challenges associated with developing players who can compete at an international level, Major League Cricket has an even more nebulous and difficult task ahead: getting Americans to care. Although the sport experienced mainstream popularity in the United States at the beginning of the 19th century, it soon lost ground to baseball.

Still, advocates seem optimistic about the future of the sport. The large amount of capital Major League Cricket has raised — more than $1 billion with backing by numerous Silicon Valley giants and prominent Indian media corporations — allows the league to address challenges with confidence.

“It’s unprecedented in its scale and ambition I think even globally for this amount of investment to go into building cricket from the grassroots up in one country, especially a country the size of the United States,” said Dunmore.

Shah expressed his hope that cricket will be included in the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles — something that hasn’t happened since 1900. The International Cricket Council has organized a bid for inclusion, a win that they say “would act as an enormous catalyst for the growth and development of the sport across America.”

And Aslam asserts that exposure and economic incentives will lend some much-needed momentum to cricket. “In any sport, when the money comes, people’s interest becomes higher,” he said. “So I think after the Major League, it will grow faster. When the team goes into the top ranks, the sponsors will come.”

With an accelerating feedback loop of funding and fans, Aslam hopes that the U.S. will be able to break into the top 12 ranking in the next two or three years, a feat that could allow the team to compete in the World Cup.

After the COVID-induced delay, Major League Cricket is set to launch in 2022. Initially, there will be only six teams in major cities across the country, including one in the Bay Area that will absorb top players from the minor league.

In the meantime, cricket proponents are doing what they can to better their chances of success, including changing a core element of the sport: the league has adopted the Twenty20 format, which reduces the typical timeline of a match from three days to a mere three hours.

“Cricket has a really fascinating mix of what I would call magical moments,” said Dunmore. “It’s got a really cool mix of physical skill that can make your jaw drop, but also a very strategic game that makes you think.”

And just like the sport itself, the cricket league’s success depends on good strategy.

Want to go?

The Grizzlies’ home venue is Arroyo Park, and a full schedule of their matches can be found at https://bit.ly/3tdpbSU.

This story was originally published September 15, 2021 at 8:54 AM.