Not for the first time, there’s been a push to introduce Americans to the mysteries of cricket. The legendary English cricketer WG Grace made an unsuccessful attempt in 1872, while Australia’s Shane Warne and India’s Sachin Tendulkar took games to New York, Houston and Los Angeles last year. Now India and the West Indies have played Twenty20 matches in Fort Lauderdale.
Florida, with its proximity to the cricket-mad Caribbean nations and a large Indian population, would seem to be a good place to start. However, Americans have been reluctant to embrace sports outside of their home-grown version of football, baseball and basketball – games, incidentally or not, that allow for plenty of breaks for TV commercials. Football, aka soccer, has taken decades to take hold and it is hardly mainstream.
If anything will engage new fans, it’s the fast-paced short form of cricket. Who’d even want to begin to explain to the uninitiated that a Test match can last for five days and still not produce a result?
