USA cricket must expand beyond immigrant communities

"If UAE can qualify for the World Cup then there's no reason why USA shouldn't. So that's going to be a focus for us in the next few years." – Dave Richardson, International Cricket Council CEO.

The golden goose that is America is never far from the thoughts of the world’s cricket administrators. The only remaining economic and political super-power having an interest in the sport would be massive for the game. And there are cricket fans in America, 10-20 million of them according to some estimates. Cricket websites around the world get a massive proportion of their traffic from the USA. Despite all of this cricket in the USA is years away from getting close to a World Cup, in fact it is probably more a case of decades.

Speaking in 2014 the then Chief Executive of the USA Cricket Association (USACA), Darren Beazley, summed it up as follows; “The ICC will tell you there are 10million cricket fans within the US. I don’t know how many of those 10 million are US cricket fans. I think what you have is immigrants that come from Pakistan, and when they are asked “do you love cricket” they say yes. Then you say would you buy a US team jersey or a Pakistan team jersey they will go for Pakistan.”

This is the issue that cricket faces in America. If the sport is to grow beyond the niche following it has amongst immigrant communities it needs to develop an American identity, and despite being in existence since 1965 USACA has singularly failed to do that. Instead cricket remains "an underground sport”, a term that was used to describe the sport by a senior USACA official in 2009. The reasons for cricket’s stagnation is as much to do with USACA as anything else. They have been suspended from the ICC twice in the last decade and they are on the brink of being booted out again.
read more here