The eyes of the cricket-loving world will be on Long Island on Sunday. Cricket World Cup Rivals Pakistan and India continue to play in front of 34,000 enthusiastic fans.
But it’s on another New York island that the bat-and-ball game has thrived for more than 150 years.
The Staten Island Cricket Club was founded in 1872 by British Wall Street traders and is the oldest continuously operating cricket club in the United States.
“In New York City, the Staten Island Cricket Club continues to be the most diverse club,” said Clarence Modest, the club’s 94-year-old president, “and the club’s philosophy has always been that cricket is for everyone.”
Over the decades, the club has hosted some of the sport’s legends, including Australian cricket pioneer Don Bradman, iconic English batsman Geoffrey Boycott and Barbados cricketer Garry Sobers, who played for the West Indies from 1954 to 1974.
The club continues to organise weekend matches and also offers a youth programme.
Modesto, from Tobago, was forced to give up playing cricket six years ago at the advanced age of 88, but has been a fan of the game since childhood.
“It’s the spirit of the game that’s important. This isn’t just a game,” Modesto said. “We’re not just going out there to beat the other guy. We want to win, but we want to win in a gentlemanly way, a civilized way.”
Modesto, a Queens Village resident and retired from the medical field, learned about the Staten Island Cricket Club in 1961 and quickly joined.
“Cricket means a lot to us,” he said. “Playing the match is the first priority. Winning matches is a secondary concern. The social aspect of cricket is extremely important.”
At SICC, matches are played according to traditional cricket rules and can last all day. On Long Island, T20 matches are played, which are generally faster and higher scoring.
“Younger teams playing the T20 version just go to the match, play, go home and don’t socialise,” Modest said. “The traditional game has a social aspect to it – you have a beer with your opponents in the clubhouse after the match and try to enjoy the camaraderie that encompasses and perpetuates cricket.”
Currently, the club has about 50 members from India, Pakistan, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Ireland, Great Britain, Sri Lanka, South Africa and the U.S. Members come from all over the five boroughs and New Jersey to the five-acre Walker Park in Livingston to play the sport they love.
Modesto doesn’t know how many members the club had at its founding because a devastating fire in 1932 destroyed the clubhouse and early records, but he said the club had 500 members at its peak.
Like baseball, cricket is played with a cork-and-leather ball and a wooden bat, and teams compete to score as many points as possible. However, the cricket field is circular, teams have 11 players instead of nine, the fielders do not wear mitts, there are no bases, and there are bowlers instead of pitchers.
A point is scored every time two players cross, and each team plays until they have 50 overs or 50 out, after which the game ends.
Six missed balls count as an over. An over can also be reached if the bowler hits the batsman’s stumps and misses the wicket above him. A caught ball can also count as an over.
The centre, or “oval” part of the field, is the “pitch”. Teammates stand at either end of the pitch, in front of the catcher and the two stumps. Each holds a bat. The bowler bowls the ball towards the batsman. If the batsman hits the ball into the air or hits the ground, the two teammates start running back and forth across the pitch until a fielder returns the ball.
Cricket is the world’s second most popular sport after soccer, with an estimated 2.5 billion fans, but it remains a minor sport in the United States, with only an estimated 30 million U.S.-based fans, according to the International Cricket Council.
But the sport has grown: In the 1990s, an estimated 20,000 people attended summer games in the U.S.; today, that number is as high as 200,000.
“Cricket has had to kind of stay in the shadows,” Modesto says, “but with more and more immigrants coming from cricket-rich countries, cricket is growing, and that’s the reality.”
This weekend, teams from South Africa, India, the Netherlands and Pakistan will compete on Long Island. Modesto has tickets for Saturday’s game, but admits he still can’t believe it.
“I never thought this day would come because there hasn’t been a very strong, forward-thinking organization in the US Cricket Association in all the decades that I’ve been here,” he said, “but at the same time, I’m full of excitement.”
