No grassroots but lots of scaffold: a peek inside New York’s cricket scene

Thirty million doesn’t go as far as you might hope in Manhattan, where it will just about stretch to a single Chelsea penthouse. But out on Long Island, where the ICC has spent its money, it’s bought two weeks’ exclusive use of all 1,000 acres of Eisenhower Park, six scaffold grandstands, two huge blocks of hospitality boxes, four drop-in cricket pitches, enough bars, restaurants, and washrooms to service for 37,000 people, and a pretzel stand. It’s an impressive set-up, especially given that it was built in six months. But then this is the city where they managed to run up the Empire State in a year and 45 days.

Apart from the up-and-down pitch, the opening game went off so smoothly that by the time it was under way the local police commissioner Patrick Ryder said his biggest worry was whether anyone was going to come down with sun stroke. ICC staff, meanwhile, were running around trying to solve a perennial American problem and find a decent cup of tea for the people in hospitality. The one thing no one had thought to lay on was a hot water urn.

 

The only trouble is that the ICC isn’t just paying for facilities, it’s trying to buy America’s attention too. It wants to develop new markets. Right now 85% of its revenue comes from India, and it has identified the US as the one to go for. Which figures. It already has an audience here among the south Asian diaspora, but, big as that group is, it is still only 5.5m people and they are scattered across an entire continent. Overall, the US TV sports rights market is more than 10 times the size of India’s, but if the ICC is going to get a piece of it, it needs to prove cricket is not just for immigrants.

 

Which is where the big set-piece game between India and Pakistan this Sunday comes in. “We had no idea what to expect,” Ryder said, “but we’re told it’s like the Super Bowl on steroids.” It is supposed to be the show that makes the locals sit up and notice.

They haven’t, yet. There was no on-the-ground advertising in Dallas, and there’s barely any in New York. On Tuesday morning the fan park at One World Trade Center was the only corner of Manhattan with tumbleweed blowing through it. England were playing Scotland in Barbados, but the big screens were off and the area was empty apart from one bored security guard standing in front of a poster with a glossary of the sport printed on it. It explained that in cricket the word wicket is simultaneously “a set of stumps and bails; the pitch/field; the dismissal of a batter”. The guard said he had “no idea what’s going on”.

 

The odd thing is, all this focus on winning over the people who don’t know anything much about the game means they seem to have overlooked some of the ones who already do. Neither of the two matches I’ve attended in the US so far was a sell out, and all of a sudden the organisers have announced that there are more tickets available for all the remaining games too. But then most of them are being held at 10.30am on the weekdays because, as ever with ICC events, the desire to serve the local audience is second to the need to keep Indian TV companies sweet. Even if it means there are empty seats in the stadiums.