On Thursday, Major League Cricket (MLC) played its debut game as the US’s only professional cricket league, the Texas Super Kings emerging victorious against the Los Angeles Knight Riders.
Playing in Grand Prairie, Texas, 15 minutes from Dallas’s airport, the Texan home team won with 181 runs and six wickets, bowling out the Knight Riders for 112.
Cricket is a wildly popular game all over the world, but not in the United States. American Cricket Enterprises, MLC’s owner, hopes to change that. Cricket now has an estimated fan base of 24 million in the US, largely due to the growth of immigrant communities already in love with the game, especially South Asian Americans.
The new league, sustained by $120 million in startup investment invites “moonshot” comparisons, including renting the Johnson Space Center’s hall for their first draft on March 19th, bolstered by the failure of previous attempts to introduce cricket to the United States.
[Image:https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1638648771524587521/M8HGYbjb_400x400.jpg] via MLCricket Twitter
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Some of MLC’s investors include prominent Indian American tech executives, like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen.
Texan billionaire Ross Perot Jr. is also involved in the league, alongside his managing partner at venture capital firm Perot Jain, the ex-cricketeer Anurag Jain. The pair co-own the Texas Super Kings with the Chennai Super Kings, their namesake team.
On the opposite side of yesterday’s game, Bollywood superstar and co-owner of the Kolkata Knight Riders, Shah Rukh Khan contributed to the LA Knight Rider’s stadium in LA.
According to Justin Geale, MLC’s tournament director, “The biggest challenge [for cricket] in this country is infrastructure, it’s finding the right spots to play the game. I come from Australia and I’ve worked in the IPL [Indian Premier League]. When I got here three years ago, I was surprised at how good the domestic talent was. I was probably a bit shocked by where they were playing – lot of it was uneven outfields, football fields, synthetic surfaces, matting, etc. We needed better facilities, that’s been our biggest challenge and will continue to be.”
To solve this issue, American Cricket Enterprises is investing millions into new and renovated cricket stadiums around the country. Yesterday’s game was played at the former stadium of the Texas AirHogs baseball team, renovated for at least $10 million to become the ‘new home of American cricket.’ Some of the later games in the season will be played at Church Street Park in Morrisville, North Carolina.
MLC is a Twenty20 league, a relatively new, shortened variant of the game that finishes a game in about two-and-a-half hours, a length much more comparable to other popular team sports. Test cricket, on the other hand, plays matches that can last for up to five days.
According to players, the league’s debut surpassed their expectations, with the Super King’s South African bowler Rusty Theron saying “I am actually a little bit emotional, to be honest. This is such a grand event. There was an unbelievable atmosphere and I want to thank each and every individual who has come out here,” he said.
If the apparent success of MLC’s first game continues, it very well might survive to add a new facet to American professional sports.
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