I usually try to leave the lesser sports and the lesser sports subsidies for the Friday roundup, so normally that’s where talk of New York City Mayor Eric Adams wanting to build a temporary cricket stadium in a public park would go … but c’mon, guys, New York City Mayor Eric Adams wants to build a temporary cricket stadium in a public park! If this isn’t blog gold, I don’t know what is:
The “temporary” and “modular” structure would host matches next June in the 2024 T20 World Cup held by the International Cricket Council, according to local officials who have been briefed on the plan by the Adams administration and an ICC proposal obtained by THE CITY…
Though they are not opposing it, Bronx elected officials told THE CITY that they have serious concerns about the plan that they heard about from the Adams administration and that would require turning over park land to a ticket-selling venue that would hold nearly as many people as Yankee Stadium or the city’s two professional basketball arenas combined. The stadium would need to be erected in less than five months, starting in January, in close proximity to the graves of enslaved Africans and likely displacing the 12 cricket pitches in the park that New Yorkers use now.
Let’s move right on to the questions:
Cricket? What?
It’s the world’s second-most popular sport, according to THE CITY! (Which, yes, is capitalized that way. It doesn’t make it any more Googleable.) I can’t find a source for that, but it’s a huge sport in South Asia, which has a ton of people in it, so it makes sense. (That it’s the world’s second-most popular sport, I mean — not even the world’s estimated 2.5 billion cricket fans would say that a sport with a position called “silly mid off” makes sense.)
And T20?
The defining characteristic of cricket is that batters get to keep batting until they make an out, and if they want they can just keep hitting pitches and never running anywhere all day while waiting for one they like better. And “all day” is no exaggeration: Plenty of cricket matches last days at a time, which led to the invention of “one day” cricket, which is limited to, you guessed it, a single day.
Alas, some sports fans do not want to spend even one entire day watching cricket, so in 2003 came the debut of T20 cricket, so named because each team is limited to one inning of 20 overs. (The “T” stands for twenty. You don’t want to know what overs are.) This variation is widely laughed at by real cricket fans, but is also seen as the only way to grow the sport in places like the U.S. where there are lots of sports fans with money and no interest in watching cricket for even one over more than 20.
Which park would this be built in?
Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, which is already home to multiple public cricket pitches. Several of these would be displaced by the T20 pitch, as shown in an International Cricket Council rendering that is for some reason in hazy black-and-white:
That would have nearly as many seats as Yankee Stadium?
Actually 34,000 seats, where Yankee Stadium holds 46,537. THE CITY’s stylebook entry for “nearly” was not available at press time.
Graves of enslaved Africans?
The Van Cortlandt family owned people as slaves. They still have a park named after them. It’s complicated.
Okay, so how much would this temporary cricket stadium cost, and who would pay for it?
This is not within the scope of the documents that THE CITY has seen! The ICC proposal document did argue that once the stadium is taken down, the city would be left with “a state-of-the-art outfield,” and who can put a price on that?
Doesn’t New York City have rules about building private venues in public parks?
Good memory! State assemblymember Jeffrey Dinowitz is wondering the same thing, telling THE CITY: “That’s a significant legal issue, which I don’t think that the administration has considered as far as I know. I think there would have to be other measures taken: A ULURP, an EIS.”
ULURP? EIS?
Sorry, that’s all the questions we have time for today!
Perfect summation of cricket, except that, in cricket, “innings” refers to both singular and plural. So, it should be, “…so named because each team is limited to one innings of 20 overs…” I don’t know why; that’s just the way it is.
Thank you for the correction, which I once knew but had blocked out, probably because it seems too silly to be true. (Which is a great description of cricket as a whole, honestly.)
“Now, I am an educated man, but when someone tries to explain cricket to me, all I want to do is hit him in the head with a teapot.”
– Jed Barlet
I wonder how temporary this structure will be once the new US pro cricket league (really) finds out that they could get a public subsidy if they ask nicely enough…
(The NYC team will be called “Mumbai Indians New York.” No, I don’t get it either.)
“Mumbai Indians” is a famous team, so it’d be a little like naming a soccer team “Real Madrid New York.” I find it weirder that the NYC team, like the entire league, will be playing in Texas, at least at first.
“the city would be left with “a state-of-the-art outfield,”?!
So they’ll have grass left over where there was grass previously. Totally worth the cost.
Artificial turf, apparently, in place of old artificial turf.
Isn’t Cricket also big in England, New Zealand and Australia? I know it’s pretty big here in $J/Silicon Valley with the South Asian population.
It’s fairly popular there and their national team players are well known. Women’s cricket is also growing in England and Australia especially. But it competes with a bunch of other sports for interest.
India is where the big money is, at least for men’s cricket, because the audience is so huge and because it is by far the biggest sport there. Much more popular than soccer.
Hasan Minhaj did a nice overview of the situation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5DWJv1hiwM
Sadly, it’s also mired in geopolitics. The upcoming World Cup (one-day international format) will be in India, but there was some kerfuffle about whether or not Pakistan would play there. India still refuses to go to Pakistan so, as I understand it, some Pakistan politicians didn’t want Pakistan to play in India. That’s been resolved, as far as I know, and India will play Pakistan in Ahmedabad.
That match will get at least a billion viewers.
In the past, at least, Pakistanis have been excluded from the IPL.
Yes, but all three of those countries combined have only half the population of Bangladesh alone, so they’re not going to get you very far toward “second-most popular sport.”
I knew FoS would eventually create a cricket category… like casinos from which some of the revenue goes to funding journalism (or journasinos), it just had to happen.
Almost no-one who isn’t from the handful of countries (don’t forget the caribbean) where cricket is popular get it… but the one important fact left out of the article is that the most watched one day sporting event last year was not the Superbowl and was not the Indy 500 or the UEFA champions league final.
It was the Indian Premier League final.
So, yeah, we may not get it… but clearly lots of people do. And there are lots of people who now call North America home who grew up with the sport. In short, there’s money in this for someone.
Not me, sadly, but for someone.
If you click through, you will see that this is actually the sixth post in the cricket category, so it happened a while ago.
I actually kind of like cricket, but I suspect that the likelihood of getting anyone who didn’t grow up with it to watch it is near zero — at least not unless there’s some sort of buddy system with trained guides to explain what the hell is going on.
Nice! I have missed so much…
T20 is supposed to draw new people in (specifically, those who don’t have the attention spans to watch a day long display of defensive batsmanship…) by putting an arbitrary limit on the number of opportunities said batsman has to create runs.
It has certainly worked in some parts of the world (where, like Cadillac owners, the avg age of cricket fans tended to be in the three digit range). But I agree, I’m not sure it will create a legion of new fans in places where the game does not already have some sort of presence.
I guess we will see. Early returns from the Texas event seemed to be positive (at least the media reports were).
There are basically three kinds of cricket.
Test cricket is the kind where both teams get two innings. They keep scoring runs until they no longer have two batters not-out. There are 11 players on a team, so that’s 10 outs. There isn’t really a limit on how many balls the batter can face so the batter can just bat defensively without running, but that’s harder to do than it looks.
Each test lasts about five days, depending on rain.
It is a long slog. The purists agree its the ultimate form of the sport, but nobody actually watches the whole thing. I watch the highlights.
In limited overs cricket, each team only bats once and their at bat is over when they run out of overs or outs.
An over is six balls (more or less) – what we’d think of as pitches. It’s called an over because the bowler switches ends after each one. That’s also when there’s a commercial.
So the batting team will often run out of balls before they run out of outs, so they have to be more aggressive. The world cup of cricket uses this format. It usually takes about four or five hours per match.
The most popular version now is T20. Both teams only get 20 overs and so usually only the top of the order even gets to bat. So they load up on guys who try to smash the ball as often as possible.
Those games take about as long as shorter baseball game, so they can be played at night.
I don’t know what NYC wants to spend on this, but I imagine the u20 T20 world championships would draw good crowds.
It is the second most popular sport in the world, largely because it is the top sport in south Asia, but also throughout the former British empire, including the west indies.
It is an official sport in NYC schools and there are rich people trying to make it work in the US. We are a bit saturated with sports but there are a lot of people in the US who grew up with it or learned it from their parents.
Not sure if that was intended to be a reply or an OP.
If the former… you realize you just attempted to explain a sport I grew up playing in school to me, right?
The production value on what I’ve seen of the IPL broadcasts easily matches American sports, too. Some seriously impressive stuff.
Not going to happen unless steve cohen gets a cut of the action.
““The entire modular stadium and all elements of construction will be built above ground”
That’s the same argument my nephews used with Legos on the bathroom rug
I admit that I do not understand the rules, in spite of people I know attempting to explain them.
I watch some guys play at a local park once in a while, and it’s clear that some are very serious, some are just having fun, and some are there just to argue about calls and rules. Which makes it oddly compelling.
But the thing that gets me is that they build in tea breaks and lunch breaks to matches. https://www.sportsadda.com/cricket/features/tea-break-time-test-cricket
How very British in its formality.
I’m glad to hear that a more professional type league is forming because there is clearly interest. But this is not suited for US tv based on the way the game is structured.
I had the same objection. The tea breaks seem like a waste of time given that some matches have to be called a draw because they run out of time before the rain.
But if you watch it on TV, you’ll see that the breaks make a lot more sense, especially when its played in oppressive heat in the southern hemisphere.
T20 is actually very well-suited to US TV for the same reasons its suited to Australian TV and Indian TV. There’s a natural commercial break every few minutes for the over and the matches are only a few hours long. There’s a lot of space on the pitch and boundary for ads.
The ODIs and Tests take most of the day and the breaks are fairly long. That’s more suited to a streaming or cable for the hardcore fans.
Speaking of conspiracies, Texas Monthly just came out with an article on how South Asian businessmen want to turn Texas into the next world hot spot for
…..cricket!!?? Say what?
Yeah, they converted a baseball field in Grand Prairie into a cricket ground and even though the place doesn’t have running water, they have big plans for it.
I’m surprised he wants to build a cricket stadium in between his battles with the police over why they aren’t being more cruel to the homeless.
You left out the best part of the story !?
This is financed by the Saudis
No, it isn’t.
Yes, there are other countries besides America.
Back in baseball’s primordial soup days, many top players (like Harry Wright and John Montgomery Ward) were able to get paid to play both sports (often while having a no-show job, professionalism being frowned on at the time).
Baseball eventually took hold and took over (jingoism helped a bit there). But cricket is hugely popular in other parts of world, and even if were only so in India (it’s not), that would still be a ton of people. (If it’s not number two, what is, exactly, then?)
MLC is catering to the four million or so people in this country who are of Indian descent, primarily, with those of West Indian descent or who otherwise have a cultural affinity for the sport a secondary target. They are not, at the moment, actively and aggressively going after American Dudebros who have NFL Sunday Ticket and take off work to watch the NCAA Tournamenf, though some may sample it. (And obviously, that four million aren’t all going to travel to Texas and North Carolina, the only two venues for this very short, proof-of-concept first “season” of MLC (which also has a minor league that started up first and has teams around the country).
It’s not THAT hard to understand if you make an effort, but, again, you and I are secondary concerns. The broadcasts are high quality. The pace is slightly languid in spots, even for what is basically the Arena Football version of the sport. (Monday night’s match on CBS Sports Network took like four hours, which is too long.)
None of that makes this idea of New York’s a good one (it’s not) but the automatic derision of anything unfamiliar is so utterly on-brand for Americans.
(And, no, it’s not funded by the Saudis. Yet. India controls cricket everywhere.)
This entire article is disrespectful to the the many countries out side of the one you googled where cricket is a major sport.
Why was this article written when your disdain for even having to write about a sport you know nothing of, that has nothing to do with you is very apparent.
I grew up in the Caribbean and it is in fact a major sport there and many other places outside of America.
Please leave articles like this to ppl who have respect for other cultures and customs or ppl who have at least left the USA.
No disrespect meant to cricket fans — as I noted above, I actually like the sport, even if it can be a little incomprehensible to first-time viewers. (It’s still better than roller derby in that regard.) And as also noted above, while the West Indies, the UK, Australia, and a few other countries are indeed cricket hotbeds, it’s South Asia (mostly India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) that makes up the bulk of cricket’s global fan base.
The ICC trying to build interest in cricket by hosting a T20 tournament in the U.S. is a bit of a gamble, not too unlike NFL Europe was, but it’s their gamble to make. Turning over public parkland (and possibly public money) and public cricket pitches so that NYC can host some games is another story, and would be even if cricket were hugely popular here.
The part about destroying public cricket pitches for a cricket stadium is 21st century sports in a nutshell.
Like, is this stadium going to be available for anyone who wants to use it for Sunday morning cricket sessions? Or is it going to be exclusive to big events.
That’s the key factor.
It’ll be temporary, just for the T20 World Cup.
First off cricket will be a plus for nyc. One the city have a very large South Asia,west indies diversity etc cricket fans, two cricket will be great for the city financially, three cricket will complete at higher level because of schools kids more involved. Now the venue will have to be a place not slowing the progress of the sport and lots great . NYC is ready to being an elite player in big way in the world of cricket. Morgan
I went to an MLC game in Grand Prairie a couple weeks ago. I watched a bunch of youtube videos in the days leading up to learn about Cricket. I had a good time, and I understood most of what was going on. One thing I will point out is that it seemed like over 90% of the fans there were of South Asian descent–that’s not a bad thing, but it seems like the fans of this league will be existing cricket fans, and they won’t gain many new fans. I hope I’m wrong.