Can Professional Cricket Thrive in America?

Like the I.P.L., the American league plays T20, the most popular short form of cricket, in which each team has up to a hundred and twenty balls to score as many runs as possible, and which prioritizes aggressive batting and canny bowling. Test cricket, played between international teams wearing white uniforms over two innings and five days, is considered by many cricket lovers to be the highest form of the game—the classic movie to T20’s YouTube video—and English cricket fans are currently gripped by the test series with Australia. But, in some parts of the world, the long form of the game is ailing.

M.L.C.’s money has bought talent. Jason Roy, an English batter who is signed to the L.A. Knight Riders, is reported to be receiving around four hundred thousand dollars to play in the first two seasons of the tournament. And, because he was still needed to play in the finals of the English domestic T20 season on Saturday, he was not even in Texas for L.A.’s first game. Roy’s deal is similar to those of other big stars who’ve joined M.L.C. Each franchise can have up to nineteen players in its squad; at most, nine of them can be international. (Only eleven per team can play a match.) The total budget for salaries is capped at around $1.15 million per squad. It’s not N.B.A. money, but in the world of international cricket there are few places outside India where the best players can earn as much in such a short period.

Perot’s partner in a venture-capital firm that he runs, and also his co-investor in M.L.C., Anurag Jain, was confident that—particularly because of the many millions of South Asian and other immigrants from cricket-playing countries in the United States—there was enough of a market already to support the league. The organizers of M.L.C. said the U.S. is roughly the third- or fourth-largest TV market for cricket globally. (This year, Willow TV is covering most of the games, and CBS Sports Network is covering at least three; in the future, the league hopes to have a regular mainstream-TV partner.) “This season is about giving a taste to people,” he said. “Get the people here, get the right talent, get the stadium, get the fans used to all of these things. Then next season move onward. Use it as a springboard,” Jain said.

The dissonance of watching cricket in Dallas was overwhelming. The stadium itself had been converted from baseball only recently, and still contained its old scoreboard, with boxes for “inning,” “ball,” “strike,” and “out.” Around the stadium were signs warning spectators to be mindful of balls struck into the crowd—written in English and in Spanish. The police officers wore Stetsons. “The Star-Spangled Banner” was sung before play began.

Still, some things about cricket are always the same. The oval field was apple-green; in a dry, hundred-and-four-degree heat, the color seemed almost obscene. In the middle was the square, the mown, straw-colored twenty-two-yard strip, or “pitch,” on which the players would bat and bowl. The surface looked good for batting. I later discovered that an Australian groundsman, David Agnew, had laid and tended the turf. Before play began, he guessed that the pitch might yield a score of around 180. The first team to bat, the Texas Super Kings, scored 181.

The match was, for the most part, entertaining. The star South African batter for Texas, Faf du Plessis, was out on his first ball—chipping an easy catch to a fielder off the bowling of the New Zealander Lockie Ferguson—but Texas rallied with explosive batting from David Miller and Devon Conway, of South Africa and New Zealand, respectively. To me, the joy was in watching Sunil Narine, the Trinidadian captain of Los Angeles, bowl. I had spoken to him the previous day, and, despite the bafflement of many Texans who had asked him what he was doing in Dallas, he was optimistic about the prospects for the league. (“Things could go big here—like, very big,” he told me.) Narine is what is known as a mystery spinner, because he can spin the ball off the pitch in a variety of ways, none predictable. Moreover, as he runs up to bowl, he hides the ball behind his back, to obscure the view of his grip from the batter—a pleasingly cartoon-villain-ish ploy. I allowed myself a brief clap of appreciation when Narine got one of the Texas batters out—what in cricket is known as “taking a wicket.”

By then, the stadium, which had been perhaps two-thirds full at the start of play, at 7:30 P.M., was almost at its capacity of seventy-two hundred. The sun had set, and, in darkness, the heat in the stadium was somewhat bearable. The crowd consisted, I guessed, of at least ninety per cent preëxisting fans of cricket, mostly of South Asian heritage. I was interested in finding new recruits to the sport, but they were thin on the ground. Christian, who had played pickup cricket with Indian-immigrant colleagues of his father’s when he was a child, had brought his girlfriend, Jamie, to watch the match. She knew nothing about cricket except for what the Internet could teach her. “I watched, like, four videos to come here, and I understood about three per cent of what’s happening,” she said. “He also acted it out for me in the living room.”

“Come on,” Christian implored. “You know the ways to get wickets.”

Jamie smiled and shrugged. There was no help on the giant screens for anybody who had never previously watched cricket—nothing to explain the laws or the customs of the sport, which is strange to the vast majority of Americans. This seemed to me like an oversight on the part of the organizers. But they were counting on enough already devoted fans so that they wouldn’t need too many newcomers—at least at first. Perot told me during the game, “This is year one. It’s like venture capital. You want to take care of that dedicated fan base. And then you want to grow the fan base.”

The arrival of a promising professional cricket league in America marks a significant moment in a revolution in men’s cricket that began with the first season of the I.P.L, in 2008. (Women’s cricket, which is increasingly popular, is behind the men’s sport in commercial terms.) Before the Indian league transformed the finances of the sport, professionals generally played domestic cricket in their own country, often on miserly wages. The best players represented their nation, in which case they were paid more. Some pros travelled to earn money overseas, but in general the very best players were rooted in the country that they hoped to represent. The I.P.L. drafted players from all over the world, onto teams with huge budgets that often paid more for a short tournament in India than other leagues could offer for the rest of the year on traditional contracts. (In that first I.P.L. auction, in 2008, the Indian star M. S. Dhoni was bought by the Chennai Super Kings for one and a half million dollars.) Since then, other T20 leagues have emerged around the world, offering good, if not Indian-level, money. Some of the best players began to reduce their commitment to—or even forgo entirely—longer, so-called red-ball games of cricket, to play white-ball, or short-form, cricket around the world.

Ed Smith, who played for England, then selected its men’s national team, and was also a consultant to the head coach of an I.P.L. team, sees the birth of the Indian league and the subsequent explosion of franchise cricket as a natural development. “It’s often presented as a rupture with the way things ought to be,” he said. “But, in actual fact, the I.P.L. only righted a disequilibrium, rather than created a disequilibrium. The vast majority of cricket fans live in India. That’s where cricket’s economy is. And the market forces, you may or may not like them, but they are a fact of life like gravity. . . . It may be that the emergence of a functioning cricketing economy in America is one way in which cricket’s ecosystem becomes more balanced rather than less.”

Sunil Narine is an excellent example of an itinerant craftsman who has flourished in the world of franchise cricket. He last played a test match for the West Indies in 2013. Since then, between T20 internationals, his professional life has led him to the following teams: the Kolkata Knight Riders (India), the Sydney Sixers (Australia), the Guyana Amazon Warriors (the Caribbean), the Cape Cobras (South Africa), the Comilla Victorians (Bangladesh), the Montreal Tigers (Canada), the Trinbago Knight Riders (the Caribbean), the Melbourne Renegades (Australia), the Lahore Qalandars (Pakistan), the Dhaka Dynamites (Bangladesh), the Oval Invincibles (England), the Abu Dhabi Knight Riders (the United Arab Emirates), and, finally, the Los Angeles Knight Riders.

Another Trinidadian, Kieron Pollard, captains M.I. New York. He is a big and powerful player; he doesn’t so much hit a cricket ball as seek to maim it. Nobody in the world has played more T20s than Pollard (six hundred and twenty-six games and counting). But, he told me, his decision to pursue a more commercial path and play franchise cricket was unpopular with traditionalists in the West Indies. He was, he says, branded “a mercenary” and “nonpatriotic.” Now he watched with a certain amount of satisfaction as the sport’s administrators scrambled to balance the commercial lure of franchise cricket with the traditional domestic game. “There’s still room for all forms of the game,” Pollard said. “But, a hundred per cent, there is going to be a lot of clashing going forward.”

The Texas Super Kings won the tournament’s opening game easily enough in the end. During the Texas innings, fans in the bleachers waved yellow flags when one of their men hit a good shot. But, when the Los Angeles innings began, it seemed as if a suspicious number of people were waving purple L.A. flags. If the teams in this competition engender no real loyalty yet, that is understandable. They are brand-new. Moreover, all of the matches in this year’s competition are being played in only two venues, making the connection of teams to home cities more tenuous. (Pity the diehard Seattle Orcas fan at this year’s tournament.)

Before Los Angeles succumbed, its Jamaican star, Andre Russell, scored a flurry of runs—prompting appreciative cries, even from spectators wearing yellow shirts. In the press box, above the old baseball scoreboard, a young team of digital journalists was furiously uploading new content to the league’s social-media accounts. One of the reporters, a cricket aficionado in his early twenties, took a pause as Russell hit a ball out of the stadium and into the parking lot. He turned to a colleague and said, “Bro, it’s so crazy: Andre Russell is playing in Texas.” ♦