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March Madness: Cricket edition

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    March Madness: Cricket edition

    A good article in today's NY Times about the inaugural American College Cricket championship. It's not recognized by the NCAA, and only five schools competed, but it's a start:

    Though cricket counts its fans by the billion worldwide, the sport does not register a pulse in the United States. Of the five teams in attendance at this experimental event last weekend — Montgomery, from Maryland; Boston University; Carnegie Mellon, from Pittsburgh; the University of South Florida and the University of Miami — most exist only as social clubs. None of them have club team status, and the sport is not officially recognized by the N.C.A.A.

    “This is an opportunity for us to really show athletic directors at a Division I level that cricket matters, cricket is a big sport and cricket has a marketing capability in this country,” said Sumantro Das, an all-rounder and junior at Boston University, who learned to play as a child in India.

    With only a few weeks’ notice, the five teams did what many college students do this time of year: they packed their sunscreen and headed to Florida. Nearly 60 players drove or flew at their own expense to the lush cricket pitches of Central Broward Regional Park. They played Twenty20, a version of cricket in which many stuffy traditions are left behind and matches are completed in about three hours instead of taking up to five days. The only custom-built cricket stadium in the United States stands in this park, but securing the 5,000-seat facility was far too rich a luxury for the tournament’s shoestring budget. Competing on the park’s manicured fields was already an upgrade over the converted soccer fields and tennis courts the players were used to.

    “I wanted them to see the stadium to know what they are playing for,” said Lloyd Jodah, the founder and president of American College Cricket. “That is where we want to be next year.”

    The idea for the college tournament came to him last year as he campaigned to have cricket included in the Olympics. Standing on Wall Street with a cricket bat in one hand and petitions in the other, Jodah, 50, an immigrant from Guyana who works selling health club memberships, met Kalpesh Patel, a Jamaican business student from the University of Miami.

    Once Jodah heard how difficult it was for college cricketers to find regular games, he began toying with the idea of a nationwide organization for collegiate clubs and founded American College Cricket. He made a group on Facebook as a way to reach out to players.

    “We always had the desire to play, but there was no real framework for us to get involved,” Patel said. “So this idea gave us the push to get involved with the most competitive form of the game.”

    Jodah and Nino DiLoreto, 62, a former soccer player from Abruzzi, Italy, spent many evenings tracking down college cricket players, and the group swelled to more than 500 members.
    This sounds like it could slowly grow and become something, well, not big, but bigger than being watched by only three fans (so the article says).

    #2
    March Madness: Cricket edition

    There are 10,000 school kids playing organized school cricket in New York City alone. So I think there's life in the old dog yet, old Bart must be spinning in his grave.

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      #3
      March Madness: Cricket edition

      Along those lines, Inzy does Staten Island?

      Inzamam-ul-Haq and up to seven disaffected members of the Lahore Badshahs ICL franchise are in discussions with an American entrepreneur who hopes to establish an international Twenty20 tournament in New York City.

      This strikes me as highly speculative (and the figure of 15 million US cricket fans as completely fanciful), but there definitely is a significant potential market in the New York Metropolitan area and the ground is empty in October.

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        #4
        March Madness: Cricket edition

        I think the 15 million figure was arrived at by taking everyone in America with a background in a cricket playing country, and calling them fans. Which as you say, is nonsense.

        Having said that, there is definitely a market in some key areas, New York with it's 100 cricket clubs being one, and California with its 600,000 Brits, and its Silicon Valley Indians, another. Though traditionally Philadelphia was the heart of American cricket back in the 19th century.

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          #5
          March Madness: Cricket edition

          Plenty of Indians in Southern California as well--there are local Hindi movie theaters that have satellite broadcasts of major test series and the CWC.

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            #6
            March Madness: Cricket edition

            Wow, I've just read that there are well over 2 million Indian-Americans, and 40% of Indian American adults have a Master's degree or a PhD.

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              #7
              March Madness: Cricket edition

              Reading the figures for cricket participation in the US, I'm wondering why they are not competing with the other fringe countries for a place at the World Cup? They certainly seem to have the base to be at this level. I think I heard before that there are competing associations who don't recognise each other, which doesn't help.

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                #8
                March Madness: Cricket edition

                Sooner or later, procricket.com will come up, with that goofy league that was up and running for one season before it's bum-on-a-subway-turn (when a drunk bum on a subway isn't hanging onto anything, and inevitably goes flying into someone's lap on that first turn.)

                They were at war with cricket's FIFA (much as the NASL was at war with FIFA,) and weren't the official recognized country.

                However, we will probably get a World Cup spot as soon as we get enough Indians and West Indians who can bowl. The sport is in the same spot as soccer in the 1900s-1910s.

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                  #9
                  March Madness: Cricket edition

                  I was talking to a couple of Canadian internationals at VRA a couple of years ago, and they told me that the problem in the States is that the USACA organization is run by a Jamaican guy called Gladstone Dainty who basically fucks up everything he touches. So everyone is just kind of waiting around for him to die, so they can move on and make progress.

                  It was Dainty who got USACA thrown out of the ICC, because he pissed them off royally. The ICC described the current USACA set-up as 'dysfunctional'.

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