Can Satya Nadella sell cricket in the US?
India, the country of my birth, fervently hoped he would establish it in the country of my choice. Then Allen Stanford got convicted for fraud, and I assumed it would be another 110 years, the length of his initial jail sentence, before anybody took up that task again. But now here’s Ross Perot Jr.
of Dallas stepping up to the crease — as you do in cricket, and not the plate, as you do in baseball. One of the country’s largest independent property developers, Perot is co-owner of Texas Super Kings, which will play Major League Cricket’s inaugural game against the Los Angeles Knight Riders, in a converted ballpark in Grand Prairie, Texas on July 13. “It’s going to be explosive,” Perot, son of the two-time presidential candidate, tells me.
And here I am, falling for it again. Only this time, my optimism about cricket’s prospects in America is not fired by Stanford’s wild-eyed enthusiasm; instead, it’s informed by the stonecold logic behind the $120 million initial investment that Perot and other owners of the MLC’s six teams are placing into the sport. They are making two bets.
The first is that the Indian diaspora in America has reached the critical mass required to sustain a cricket league in this country. The second is that fans of the sport worldwide will watch televised games from the US. The first bet is the surer of the two.
The Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, reckons the Indian diaspora is the country’s second-largest after Mexicans, numbering north of 2.7 million, or nearly a million more than when Allen Stanford was breathing the free air. With a median household income of $150,000, Indians are also among the wealthiest immigrants. Although the largest concentrations are in the New York-New
. Read more on economictimes.indiatimes.com
