The T20 World Cup 2024 schedule is out. And as reported by RevSportz in December, India will play Pakistan in the marquee clash in New York on June 9, 2024. With a huge expatriate population in tristate area, and with cricket making it to the LA28 Olympic Games schedule, it is no surprise that all of India’s games will be played in the United States. While some might argue that this isn’t great news for cricket in the Caribbean, it is clearly a market-driven call. The International Cricket Council (ICC) is determined to grow cricket in the USA, and its best bet is to get the Indians to play more in the country.
After the blockbuster India-Pakistan clash at the MCG in October 2022, which witnessed Virat Kohli playing one of the greatest knocks in T20 history, the match in New York is expected to attract huge global attention, and Sunday evening television viewership in the subcontinent is expected to break new records.
Interestingly, the first recorded cricket match in North America was in New York in 1751, on the site of what is today the Fulton Fish Market in Manhattan.
Cricket, records indicate, remained popular in the Americas until the 1860s and the first recognized international match between Canada and USA was attended by over 10,000 spectators at Bloomingdale Park in New York in 1844. Tours to and from the US were common until the 1880s, and the best moment for US cricket came when a United States side defeated the West Indies in an international match in British Guyana in 1880. Though matches between Americans and British residents were played on the American West Coast right through the 1880s and 1890s, cricket, by the turn of the century, had given way to baseball. By the end of the Civil War, baseball’s ascendance to the top of the American sporting pantheon was inevitable, if not already complete. Though cricket would experience a revival in the 1870s, it would never again compete with baseball as either a participatory or a spectator sport in the United States.
With cricket once again making a comeback with MLC and LA28, not to mention the T20 World Cup, the next few years could well define the future of the sport in what could be a huge market for it going forward.
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