India coach Rahul Dravid with captain Rohit Sharma and Ravindra Jadeja before leaving for New York to participate in the T20 World Cup 2024.
| Photo Credit: PTI

Following Team India’s first training session ahead of their ICC T20 World Cup opening clash, star allrounder Ravindra Jadeja said it will be fun playing cricket in New York.

The ICC T20 World Cup will be played in the West Indies and the USA from June 1 to 29. Men in Blue will also play Bangladesh in their only warm-up game on June 1 at Nassau County International Cricket Stadium in New York.

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) took to their official social media handle and shared and shared a glimpse of their first training session in the US. In the video, Jadeja sounded hopeful before the start of the mega tournament.

“First time we gonna play cricket in New York, it’s gonna be fun,” Jadeja said in the video.The strength and conditioning coach of Team India Soham Desai said the players have eased their routines after reaching New York.

“We came in the day before yesterday and we just eased into our routines here, the players are just getting used to the time zone. Today we are having our first ground session…,” Soham said.

Meanwhile, India pacer Jasprit Bumrah said, “we have not yet played cricket, came here for a team activity today. Hopefully, it will be good. The weather is really good, so we are looking forward to it.”

The Men in Blue vice-captain and allrounder Hardik Pandya said, “very exciting to be here in New York, has a good vibe, bright sun out.”

“I heard the cricket is growing here in the U.S., so we are really excited and the first day here was amazing, so very excited for the few days coming up,” Suryakumar Yadav further added.

India will start their T20 World Cup campaign on June 5 against Ireland at the newly constructed Nassau County International Cricket Stadium in New York.

Meanwhile, the most-awaited blockbuster clash between India and Pakistan will take place on June 9. They will later play tournament co-hosts USA (June 12) and Canada (June 15) to wrap up their Group A matches.

In the tournament, India will be aiming to end their ICC trophy drought, having last won the ICC Champions Trophy in 2013. Since then, India has reached the 50-over World Cup final in 2023, semifinal in 2015 and 2019, the title clash of the ICC World Test Championship in 2021 and 2023, T20 WC final in 2014, semifinals in 2016 and 2022 but failed to secure a big ICC trophy.

India squad for T20 World Cup:

15-member squad: Rohit Sharma (C), Hardik Pandya (VC), Yashasvi Jaiswal, Virat Kohli, Suryakumar Yadav, Rishabh Pant (WK), Sanju Samson (WK), Shivam Dube, Ravindra Jadeja, Axar Patel, Kuldeep Yadav, Yuzvendra Chahal, Arshdeep Singh, Jasprit Bumrah, Mohd. Siraj

Reserves: Shubman Gill, Rinku Singh, Khaleel Ahmed and Avesh Khan.

Parmanand Sarju, founder of the Long Island Youth Cricket Academy, instructs players during practice at Eisenhower Park in East Meadow, New York on May 11, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

Say “silly mid-off” or “deep backward square leg” or “a single to long leg” to the average American and it’ll trigger a quizzical look.

Cricket — the so-called “gentlemen’s game” with complex rules, funnily worded fielding positions and matches that go on for five days — is hardly high up in the national consciousness of the United States, adding to the fascination of the Twenty20 World Cup the country is co-hosting with the Caribbean next month.

Yet it wasn’t always this way.

In the mid-19th century, cricket was regarded as something of a popular pastime in the United States.

Brought over by immigrants, it flourished in New York and Philadelphia in particular. Indeed, the first ever international cricket match — between the United States and Canada — was played in the Big Apple in 1844, and touring teams from England crossed the Atlantic to play.

By the time of the Civil War in the 1860s, baseball had become the dominant bat-and-ball game in the States and cricket was tailing off, becoming instead a sport that took a deeper hold in British colonies in Asia and the Caribbean.

“Baseball — at that time called ‘the lightning sport,’ though it became, for many, too stodgy and slow — could be played in two to three hours, which suited the hasty American temperament,” John Thorn, the official historian for Major League Baseball, told The Associated Press. “Cricket continued as the preferred sport of gentleman, but baseball became the democratic ideal.”

That cricket is making a comeback, of sorts, in the U.S. through its shortest format — in T20 — maybe makes sense.

Major League Cricket, a T20 competition, started up last year and now there’s a World Cup being staged as the International Cricket Council seeks to expand to a new market where, according to the sport’s global governing body, there are already 30 million cricket fans. It’s in the U.S. where cricket is making its return to the Olympic program for the Los Angeles Games in 2028.

“The commitment to grow cricket in the U.S. is real,” said Los Angeles organizing committee sports director Niccolo Campriani.

That could easily have been said 200 years ago, or maybe more.

According to USA Cricket, the first hard evidence of cricket being played in the U.S. came as early as 1709 when William Byrd, the owner of Westover Plantation in Virginia, wrote in his diary: “I rose about 6 o’clock and Colonel Ludwell, Nat Harrison, Mr. Edwards and myself played at cricket, and I won a bit.”

It is also noted by the governing body that Benjamin Franklin brought cricket’s official rule book — the 1744 Laws — back from England in 1754 and that there’s anecdotal evidence George Washington’s troops played what they called “wicket” in 1778, more than a decade before he became the first U.S. president.

Though anti-English sentiment hardened after the American Revolution in the late 18th century, cricket was still played in 22 states by up to a thousand clubs by the mid-1800s. A drop-off came during and after the Civil War, by which time baseball — a sport played in England earlier than in America, as documented by author David Block — took hold.

According to Thorn, there are “myriad assertions … but no hard evidence” that baseball descended from cricket or even rounders, another bat-and-ball game.

“The theory of lineal descent of games is a mistaken idea, in my view: rather than an evolutionary tree, the story more resembles a bramble bush,” he told the AP.

There is, however, undoubted crossover between baseball and cricket, not least in the language used in the two sports, such as “pinch-hitter” or “innings.”

Thorn said baseball has tended to follow trends established in cricket, citing overarm throwing, the imparting of spin on the ball and the potential future use of Hawkeye technology, which cricket has deployed since 2001.

On the other hand, cricket’s move five-day tests to shorter, limited-overs formats, such as Twenty20 and the Hundred in England, has seen it become a sport where sluggers can thrive in an all-out-attack environment.

The “home run” in baseball is akin to the “six” in cricket as batters attempt to smash the ball over the boundary rope and into the crowd.

Spectators at Nassau County in New York, Grand Prairie outside Dallas and Broward County in Florida are likely to appreciate those shots more than any other in the coming weeks.