Of all the well-known venues around New York City coming under threat from Islamic extremists this summer, none are more unexpected than the Nassau County International Cricket Stadium (NCICS) on Long Island. Not just because the 34,000-seat outdoor venue makes a poor target, but because who knew there was a world-class cricket stadium just 32 miles east of Manhattan?
If you didn’t know, you could be forgiven for not knowing. Just four months ago, the 8.3-acre site at Eisenhower Park in East Meadow was little more than a muddy field in need of some maintenance. That opportunity has arrived in the form of the Men’s T20 Cricket World Cup, a biennial, 20-team tournament that got underway at the stadium on Monday and will run until June 12.
Eight of the tournament’s 55 matches will be played at NCICS, including Sunday’s match between India and Pakistan, widely considered the cup’s most thrilling and an apparent ISIS target according to recent reports. The rest of the tournament will be played in Florida, Texas and the Caribbean. England will beat Pakistan to win the tournament in Australia in 2022. The United States, which recorded a thrilling come-from-behind victory in the opening game in Dallas on Saturday, will play its only match at Eisenhower Park, against powerhouse India on June 12.
This year’s T20 final – T20 cricket is a shortened version of a traditional Test match, which usually lasts five days, to three and a half hours – will be held in Barbados on June 30.
Few cities can rival New York for world-class sports, but Gotham is an unlikely home for cricket. When FIFA brought the World Cup to the U.S. in 1994, pundits made similar comments about soccer. Today, there are an estimated 200,000 cricketers in the U.S., but cricket’s status is still low compared to soccer’s 30 years ago. But T20 organizers hope the tournament can have the same impact on American cricket that FIFA had on soccer.
“The United States already has the largest television audience for cricket in the world and we hope this event will give fans an opportunity to watch top-level cricket on home soil,” said Brett Jones, CEO of the T20 USA local organizing committee.
The raw materials are already there: There are about 400 local cricket leagues across the country, including in New York, according to the United States Cricket Association. Like soccer, which was popularized by immigrants from Latin America, cricket’s rise has been driven by immigrants, particularly from the Caribbean and South Asia. More than a million immigrants from those regions live in the New York area, making it the epicenter of American cricket. “So it was only natural that we would have the opportunity to play there,” Jones adds.
New York may be unfamiliar with cricket, but the sport itself is not new to the city. The sport was introduced by British settlers in the 18th century, and the New York Gazette reported a match between a London team and a local team in 1751. In September 1844, the United States played against Canada on what is now the corner of Fifth Avenue and 31st Street. It was the sport’s first international match, seven years before the America’s Cup.
Cricket remained popular into the mid-19th century, but “the Civil War killed it,” Professor Tim Lockley, a social historian at the University of Warwick, told The Post. “This not only meant literally that more than 600,000 people died – some of whom were cricketers – but also figuratively that the South was in too much turmoil after 1865 to host any organised sport.”
“But in neither the North nor the South was there an immediate return to pre-war life.”
But it was baseball that really killed cricket, because not only did games take hours instead of days, but they could also be played on almost any surface, rather than on pitches that required constant maintenance.
When the Imperial Cricket Council (later the International Cricket Council) rejected U.S. membership in 1909, American cricket was on life support and, without the arrival of immigrants from cricket-playing countries, the sport might have disappeared.
Immigrants like Clarence Modesto.
A native of Tobago, Modesto moved to Brooklyn in 1959 and is president of the Staten Island Cricket Club, New York’s oldest cricket club, where he has been a member since 1961.
“I remember playing in the New York Metropolitan League in the ’60s, when there were only six teams in the city,” recalled the retired radiologist from Queens Village.
John Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Cornell University who moved to New York from England in 1992 and is a member of one of New York’s biggest clubs, the Wanderers, has played for the Mad Dogs and is coordinator for the World Series league, agrees.
“There can be 100 cricket matches played in New York in a weekend,” he added, “and some of them are of a very high standard, even if the pitches are not up to standard.”
The NYPD also has a team.
Detective Ahmad Chohan, from East Meadow, came to America from Pakistan at age 14, but he had nowhere to go and his interest waned. It wasn’t until he found a group of like-minded people that they joined forces.
“There were a lot of officers from South Asian and Caribbean countries who wanted to play, so I formed the NYPD team in 2010 and have been playing ever since,” he said.
Meanwhile, Chub Bedassie is the owner of Brooklyn-based Bedassie Sports, the city’s only cricket equipment store, which has been in his family since his cricket-mad father emigrated from Guyana in the 1950s and opened the first store.
“It’s a vibrant scene,” he says. “We have a lot of immigrants who come to New York and then move on to further afield, but they carry their passion for cricket with them wherever they go.”
“And the game continues to expand.”
In 2021, USA Cricket, the governing body of cricket in the United States, and Cricket West Indies jointly submitted a bid to host the ninth tournament, and were selected as the host by the ICC in November that year.
The popularity of cricket in New York was a major reason it was allowed to host World Cup matches, and interest has only grown since then.
Last year, the inaugural Major League Cricket (MLC) season was held in July, with more than 70,000 fans attending the 18-day, six-team tournament at Grand Prairie Stadium in Dallas and Church Street Park in Morrisville, North Carolina.
The tournament, won by the New York franchise, was watched in 87 countries and broadcast live on CBS Sports, and the season generated more than $8 million in revenue, exceeding expectations.
Eight World Cup matches will be played in New York, but getting there hasn’t been easy.
Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx was originally intended as the site for the stadium, but faced stiff opposition from local community groups and, ironically, the park’s cricket players, who ended up cancelling their entire season to allow construction to take place.
Once the ICC pulls out in September 2023, attention shifts to Eisenhower Park, a 930-acre public space in Nassau County where a temporary 34,000-seat stadium was constructed in just 106 days.
“The biggest challenge was the short schedule to build a stadium this large,” said Jeff Keith, senior principal at the stadium’s designers, Populous. “Many people thought it was impossible, but we made it happen.”
The stadium, reportedly costing $30 million to build and funded by T20 USA, features a 40-row, 75-foot-tall grandstand that is already used for Formula 1, professional golf and tennis.
“From a sustainability perspective, the NCICS design is unique,” Keith said. “The grandstands are repurposed and the seating is temporary so it can all be reused again once the ICC T20 World Cup is over.”
Cricket requires fields and pitches (the narrow strip between bowler and batter) to be closely mowed, so no expense was spared in creating the perfect playing surface: Over the course of three months, the entire field and 10 pitches were grown in Florida and transported 1,300 miles to Long Island in 20 trucks.
Now, NCICS stands tall above Eisenhower Park, and Chauhan can’t wait to get it up and running.
“I can’t believe the Cricket World Cup is happening so close to home, I can walk there,” he said.
Rudolph John, 69, is originally from St. Vincent but now lives in Farmingdale. He is the co-founder of the Long Island Youth Cricket Academy (LIYCA) and teaches cricket to young people every Saturday at Eisenhower Park.
“I really hope that the World Cup can have the same impact on cricket that the FIFA World Cup had on cricket in 1994,” said the former New York Department of Corrections officer.
Modesto, president of the Staten Island Cricket Club, agrees.
“We’ve had soccer moms,” he said. “What we need now is cricket moms.”
When the NCICS kicked off two weeks ago, organisers introduced ambassadors including cricket legends Kurtley Ambrose (West Indies) and Shoaib Malik (Pakistan) and sprint superstar Usain Bolt.
Obviously, the World Cup is going to be a big talking point.
“Needless to say, the United States is of strategic importance to the world in continuing to grow the sport of soccer, so we will start with the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup and continue through to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games.”
Despite growing participation numbers, public awareness of cricket remains sluggish: A recent YouGov survey of 1,142 Americans found that eight in 10 had never heard of a cricket league, and only one in five expressed an interest in the World Cup.
However, 52 percent of respondents still believed the United States would win the competition.
The United States is one of the least likely nations to win, but hosting the tournament in the U.S. has already been its biggest victory.
