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The inaugural Major League Cricket (MLC), the first professional US cricket tournament, will begin in the United States on July 13. The tournament will run until 30 July and will be played under the rules of T20 cricket, a shortened format developed twenty years ago and increasingly popular ever since, where matches do not last longer than three and a half hours of play.
Major League Cricket, for which an initial investment of 120 million dollars has been made, is an attempt to grow in the United States what is considered the second most watched sport in the world after soccer. Besides being hugely popular in the Indian subcontinent it is also followed in UK, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and some other Commonwealth countries as well. To spread in the United States, however, will have to deal with baseball.
The origins of cricket are debated but nonetheless linked to late medieval England. From there the game (in its various forms and evolutions) reached North America rather quickly, reaching a considerable following as early as the 19th century. Until before the Civil War — which began in 1861 and ended in 1865 — cricket was considered even more popular than baseball. It was no coincidence that in 1844 in the United States what is considered the first international cricket match (according to some versions the first sporting event, of any sport, between two national teams) was played between the United States and Canada (Canada won after two days of game).
However, the popularity of cricket decreased over the decades and with the simultaneous spread of baseball, a similar sport, perhaps born in the United Kingdom but perceived as American in a country where indigenous sports tend to be successful.
Now the MLC wants to try to change things. Six teams associated with cities including New York and San Francisco will participate in the tournament and one, the Texas Super Kings, from the state which will host most of the games of the first edition: the others will be played in Morrisville, North Carolina. The owner of one of the participating teams, the Seattle Orcas, is also Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft of Indian origins.
There will be nineteen matches in all, with a preliminary phase followed by the playoffs. Given the brevity of the tournament, some US players and other world-class foreign players will play for the teams, chosen through a “draft” (a selection by round) as is customary in the very popular Indian championship, the Indian Premier League.
First, the MLC will target US residents with ancestry in cricketing countries, particularly India. However, the idea is to also use the tournament to teach cricket to those who don’t know it, focusing in particular on their affinities with baseball. In this regard, he wrote theEconomist, the MLC “engaged influencers who typically deal with baseball to promote cricket among their followers”. always theEconomistbut in December 2022, he wrote that “cricket and America” were “made for each other”, and that there was much to expect from the meeting between the “second most popular sport in the world and the largest sports market in the world».
Justin Geale, competition director for MLC, told the Guardian that the goal is to get to a big annual tournament, like Major League Baseball: «Now we’re building the infrastructure, we need a Minor League [una serie minore, ndr], a major league and a competitive national team. There’s a lot to do and it will take time, but I think the growth will be great, because the product is excellent and it will work».
The birth of the MLC is also linked to the fact that in 2024 the United States will host, together with the countries of the West Indies, the T20 Men’s Cricket World Cup. There are also those who think that sport has a good chance of being included among the Olympic ones in view of the Los Angeles 2028 Games, always in its T20 format.
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2023-07-16 08:35:08
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