Author: Sean Brown

I’ve returned home to Columbus, Ohio, after four days in a cricket-induced haze. I had a hard time remembering what day it was this morning when I woke up to head to the airport. I wasn’t sure what time my flight was, but I know it went by faster than it should have, because I was finally able to catch up on a little bit of sleep on the way home. For four days, I lived a sports lover’s dream: just live for the games, talk about the game with other fans, stay up late watching the ending, sleep little,…

In the field of social psychology, there is an idea called the Minimal Group Paradigm. In a minimal group study, scientists try and discover the slightest, most trivial, basis by which people will form groups. As it turns out, we will form groups – and begin to feel in-group bias and out-group prejudice – over some pretty arbitrary conditions like, say, shirt colour or sports team affiliation. But that’s not where I want to take this idea. I want to borrow it and place it in a new context. I call it the Minimal Swag Paradigm. The question now becomes:…

Grand Prairie: More than once during the wildly successful opening night for Major League Cricket (MLC), I heard crowd members say, in wondrous disbelief, that they couldn’t believe this was actually happening… that MLC had really done it. They had planned a high-level domestic T20 league, renovated an old baseball stadium (which looked incredible, by the way), attracted top-level talent and staged a delirious party for the 7200-plus at Grand Prairie Stadium on the opening night. The theme of the night was a dream no one wanted to end. Fans smiled as they entered the park and kept smiling. Even…

This week, Major League Cricket, the most significant and well-funded effort to bring a top-level domestic cricket competition to the United States of America, released its inaugural schedule to little local media fanfare. Despite substantial investment and the inclusion of a plethora of international talent, local media coverage of the league remains scant. In fact, none of the largest newspapers in MLC team markets covered the schedule release, and nearly all failed to cover March’s inaugural player draft. While there have been a few more stories in local alternative news outlets – the Dallas Observer or the Washingtonian, for example…