Beyond Boundaries

World Cups, as the title and its concept suggest, ought to be a global event. Think of the football version, which until recently saw 32 nations— drawn almost equally from the five continents (plus Oceania)—compete for the sport’s greatest trophy. Although football really doesn’t need an outreach programme given its popularity, what with there being more countries registered under the FIFA banner than the United Nations, the game somehow managed to go even more global when the previous edition of the World Cup (2022) was hosted for the first time by a Muslim nation, Qatar; very far, geographically and culturally, from the traditional centres of Europe and South America. The following FIFA World Cup in 2026, incidentally, will witness a participation boost from 32 countries to 48, and will be played across three countries in North and Central America.

Now, think cricket; specifically, the ODI World Cup, still the most cherished prize in the game. When it was last held, in its spiritual home of India at the fag end of 2023, there were a total of 10 competing nations. Half of them were not only from Asia but further localised by being South Asian—India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. The other five consisted of two nations from Oceania, Australia and New Zealand, along with a lone representative from the European Union and Africa in the Netherlands and South Africa, respectively, and of course England, the inventors of the game. With West Indies not even qualifying for theevent, therewasn’tasingleteamfromthewestoftheAtlantic, the twin continents of the Americas then wholly ignored in a ‘World’ Cup. An appropriate name for the tournament could’ve been the Commonwealth Cup 2023, given that 80 per cent of the participating teams were from that association of nations.

Then, 2024 happened.

Just six months after the 50-over edition in India, the T20 World Cup, ongoing and in its second stage currently, changed the way the world views what was considered an Indianised game. Not only does it boast of the largest collection of countries, 20, to set off the main stage of a world event in cricket, the presence of some of the nations to have been slotted into the four groups (of five teams each) wholly puts the world in this cup. There’s Uganda from Sub-Saharan Africa, Papua New Guinea from the Pacific, and Oman from the Middle East, while Ireland and Scotland add to the Netherlands’ existing European flavour. But most significantly, the 2024 T20 World Cup flexes with a strong American presence—the US, Canada, and of course, the West Indies. If all of this is a hint at the game’s globalisation, the fact that the group stages were heavily hosted in three major American cities screams globalisation from the rooftops.

New York City, Dallas in Texas and Fort Lauderdale in Florida were home to as many as 16 group games and cricket had finally, sighingly arrived where it had hoped to for a long while now, the US. There were previous attempts to tap into the North American market, with a few stray India-Pakistan bilateral series in Toronto, Canada, at the turn of the century and also the odd West Indies- India fixtures in Florida, a recent phenomenon witnessed these days at the end of a lengthy tour of the Caribbean. But for there to be a consolidated effort across multiple venues and during an event of this magnitude no less, one the string-pullers would have otherwise deemed fit to be played only in the money-spinning territories of India, England or Australia, is nothing less than a giant leap for cricketkind.

Bollywood, the only other worldwide consumption of Indianness bigger than cricket, has known the mantra for global success for at least two decades now: keep the fans in India happy but keep the Non-Resident Indians (NRIs), paying in dollars and pounds, happier. They always had the pounds of England’s NRIs and to a certain extent, the Australian dollars from Down Under. But to see real dollar signs, the sport always needed the US. Why? This statistic should lend a deep perspective: the Indian diaspora (people of Indian origin as well as Indian immigrants) in Australia is roughly 700,000; that number increases to 1.5 million in the UK; whereas, in the US, the diaspora balloons to close to 5 million. That number alone ensured that the bigwigs who run the game threw in their collective might to ensure that T20 cricket was included as a discipline for the upcoming Summer Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028. But it wasn’t until this World Cup that cricket knew that it had finally hit Bollywood’s motherlode. The flag had been planted.

In the leafy confines of Eisenhower Park in Nassau County, Long Island, just outside the bustle of New York City, mush­roomed a gigantic cricket stadium capable of holding 34,000 fans on its temporary stands, by far the biggest premises for this bat-and-ball sport in baseball country. It filled up rather easily when Rohit Sharma’s India met Babar Azam’s Pakistan on June 9 despite intense security after a threat of a lone wolf attack came to light, but positively glimmered with global appeal when hosts US met India and the terraces packed in spectators of the country’s three primary races: white, Black and brown. All three colours were present in the US squad as well that lined up on the playing field to clutch their hearts and sing the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’.

For cricket to be truly global, the sport needed to grow in the North American territories. And for the US to take a keen interest in what has remained an alien game to them, the country needed a strong team that could hold its own at a big event. Both these stars aligned miraculously at this World Cup, as Team USA made rapid strides from underdogs to giant-killers. In the tune-up to the event, the US defeated Bangladesh in a bilateral series, which sent shock waves around the cricket world. Those waves then turned seismic at the World Cup, when a team made up largely of rejects from the Indian domestic fold felled Pakistan in Dallas, holding their nerve to force a tie before winning the match in a Super Over. Their campaign is still very much alive and kicking in the second round of this edition, even as the 2009 champions Pakistan have returned home.

The US’ success has a global hue. The man who bowled that Super Over at the Grand Prairie Stadium was Saurabh Netravalkar, a Mumbaikar, who not only represented India at the Under-19 World Cup in 2010, but also ended up as their top wicket-taker with nine wickets, despite that squad containing bowlers such as Jaydev Unadkat, Harshal Patel and Sandeep Sharma, all household names thanks to the IPL. Not only did Netravalkar never get to play in the IPL, the left-arm pacer played just one match for Mumbai in the Ranji Trophy, against Karnataka in 2013. The lack of opportunity forced the Malad boy to pursue further studies in America, and he received a Master’s degree from Cornell University shortly after. Today, he is a full-time software engineer at Oracle.

Yet, cricket found a way to dig its claws back into a man who had famously cut off ties with the sport to such an extent that he did not even carry his bowling spikes with him when he first left for his university in New York. Perhaps he was at the right place at the right time, for the sport had begun growing internally and organically in America by the late 2010s, even if only among the immigrant population. Just as he arrived on these shores, Major League Cricket was about to be unleashed on the Americans and soon he was representing the country, albeit against other associate nations. But before he knew it, the game was desperate to establish itself in his new home and so he promptly stopped the might of Pakistan in its tracks and followed it up with the wicket of India’s captain in the following game. That wicket read: Mumbaikar Rohit, caught by Mumbaikar Harmeet Singh, bowled by Mumbaikar Netravalkar.

But just when the world’s eyes were on the game looking to flex its universality on the foreign fields of America, a small village in Cyprus drew its collective gaze its way on June 17. In a village called Episkopi, an Indian immigrant named Sahil Chauhan walked out to bat for Estonia and smashed the fastest-ever T20 century, register­ing the three-figure mark in just 27 balls. With each of his 18 sixes, also a world record, in his unbeaten essay of 144, an Indian playing for Estonia in Cyprus pushed cricket’s global boundaries just that little bit further than it had ever been before

About The Author

Aditya Iyer

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