Pitch the right line and length in US
ICC Men's T20 World Cup aspires to make cricket more than an immigrant-expatriate's game in the US. Managers of the game globally would like to see it as a pivotal moment despite the lack of public interest and substandard pitches. On both, more groundwork needs to be done.
But the spectacle has served a limited purpose of raising awareness. The fact that some players, and most spectators, will remain in the US once the event is over improves the prospects of cricket's gestation in the US. For now, it will remain an immigrants' game, which is fine so long as South Asians keep queuing up for green cards.
It works especially for India, which claims the game as its own, and contributes financial heft and cricketing prowess for its global expansion.
Indian consumers keep the cricket advertising rupees flowing, and can now reasonably expect to see traction in the home markets of the brands they buy. Cricket allows India to exercise a soft option to its mounting hard power, another element in possibly feeding the US ecosystem for the game. Britain's economic eclipse, and the US Civil War that saw the rising popularity of the 'simpler' baseball, caused the flight of cricket from the US.
No other cricket-playing nation can do as much to restore it in the US as India can.
Immigrants alone can't pull it off. By the second generation, cricket usually becomes a receding memory. Like football, cricket will have to cross the cultural barrier through a high-visibility campaign in a celebrity-obsessed society.
For starters, it must overcome stereotypes of being, how Robin Williams described it, 'baseball on sedatives'. That involves a bottoms-up approach instead of top-down efforts like the ICC World Cup. Or, for that matter, the
. Read more on economictimes.indiatimes.com
