From press conferences set against statues of bald eagles to construction workers burning the midnight oil, it’s all happening in Texas as cricket looks to light a spark
Peter Della Penna13-Jul-2023It’s 2am in Grand Prairie, Texas, a city of 200,000 people. While most of its residents are happily asleep, there’s a lot of noise coming from just off Exit 34 of US Interstate Highway 30. With the first ball of the inaugural season of Major League Cricket (MLC) less than 18 hours away, a few dozen construction workers, not to mention MLC tournament director Justin Geale and a small number of his staff, are burning the midnight oil to get everything at the venue finished.Until 2020, the stadium was the home of a minor league baseball team called the Texas Airhogs. But minor league baseball’s Covid-enforced cancellation of the 2020 season started a domino effect that resulted in the Airhogs folding, MLC taking over the lease of the stadium, and spending more than $20 million to renovate and repurpose the facility for cricket. That included stripping apart the original seating structures to allow the outfield to be redesigned for cricket before relaying the grass and installing new seats everywhere.The stadium might not look new to residents as they drive by, but on the inside, the smell of fresh paint is still pungent in the air. Cement is still drying from the newly installed section-pole markers. The sound of power-drills continues to whirr as cup-holders are attached to chairback seats being installed in high-end sections of the stadium.A few hundred feet away, numbered stickers are going on seats. The only thing breaking the monotony of working through each seat of the empty stadium is the sound of Zac Brown Band’s classic country anthem “Chicken Fried” blasting away on one of the construction crew’s speakerphones. According to the construction foreman, they’ll be on the job for another six hours, till well after the sun rises, to see the job to its completion.Burning the midnight oil: not much time and still quite a few finishing touches needed at the Grand Prairie stadium•Peter Della PennaIn temperatures well past 100F (38C) all week, local workers who have never seen a cricket match have been pouring thousands of hours of sweat – mostly in 15-hour shifts, ending purely for a union-mandated nine-hour break before coming back to repeat the 15-hour cycle all over again – to get everything ready to give the newly formed Americanfranchise cricket league its grand debut in Grand Prairie.”Growing cricket in America is not a piece of cake,” Sameer Mehta, co-founder of MLC, tells ESPNcricinfo in Dallas after the conclusion of the tournament’s trophy unveiling and captains’ press conference. “We’ve got a unique set of challenges out here. We’ve got cities that are lukewarm interested. We’ve got audiences that are not used to cricket happening locally so they focus on cricket that happens elsewhere, even though they love the sport. We’ve got a wonderful sport that people are confused about. Is it five days, is it one day, is it T20? And then we have no facilities.”So it’s taken us four years, and we’ve got somewhere. We’ve got one, I would say, pretty well-done facility in Grand Prairie. We’ve got a facility in Morrisville that the city was kind enough to build and that we are enhancing. We have four more in the pipeline. I feel very good with where we are right now. We are at the start of something. Four years back, it wasn’t the start. Four years back, we were building something. Now we are going to start executing.”Part of the reason that the Grand Prairie venue was targeted for securing the lease towards the end of 2020 is because Mehta believes the Dallas Metroplex local community will embrace local cricket. Communities like Plano and Irving have a heavy South Asian influence, seen not just in the number of South Asian shops, but also by the fact there more than 250,000 subscribers of Willow TV (MLC’s American TV broadcast partner) between the Dallas and Houston metro areas. It stands Grand Prairie in sharp contrast to the transient experience of Lauderhill, Florida, as a neutral site where 15,000 fans flooded in during the summer of 2019 to watch India play matches against West Indies while USA played in front of 19 people just weeks later on their home ODI debut against the likes of Papua New Guinea and Namibia.
“You walk into baseball, and facilities are unbelievable. You walk into a stadium and you go ‘wow’ and you go, ‘This could be cricket in America.’ I don’t know how many years it would take to get there, but you see cricket working like it. It’s got a different feel to it than anywhere else in the world.”Faf du Plessis, who will captain Texas Super Kings, on sport in the USA
There may be some credence to Mehta’s $20 million investment bet on Grand Prairie. Opening night at Grand Prairie Stadium has already been confirmed as a sellout at the 7,200 seat venue, albeit with between 1,000 to 2,000 seats given away for free to local MLC academy players and their families. Ticket sales have not been quite as robust in Texas for the remaining seven fixtures over the first week before the tournament shifts to Morrisville, North Carolina. But the amount of revenue-generating ticket sales has been healthy enough to be in the mid-four-figures, a volume of daily ticket sales that is unprecedented for a cricket event in America.”Five of those days are going to be sold out,” says Mehta, believing that there will be more buyers on gameday. “Three of those days are going to be at least half full, possibly sold out. Now that doesn’t mean that we won’t get some academy kids to come fill up some seats. But my view is, as far as the economics of the event go, we have crossed $2 million in ticket sales. We are fine and the product will fine.”There will be three days where we may have less than full attendance, but otherwise people have shown enough enthusiasm to come. Again, this is Texas in the middle of summer [with temperatures forecast to be 103F at game time], but we couldn’t get any other window to play because of the world calendar and 11 games in a small time frame and that too without a hugemarketing blitz. It’s been very organic and the majority of the games in Texas will be sold out, and Morrisville will be all sold out.”Even for a player who has seen it all in international cricket and the franchise scene, Texas Super Kings captain Faf du Plessis said he has been impressed since arriving in Dallas to lead the home-town franchise. Du Plessis was one of several players were hosted on field at a baseball game by the reigning World Series champion Houston Astros last week – most MLC teams used the Prairie View Cricket Complex in Houston as a training base while Grand Prairie Stadium was going through its finishing touches – and it gave him a glimpse of where cricket in America might one day reach if MLC goes according to plan.A very-American wing of Perot Investments HQ was the scene of the pre-tournament captains’ press conference (In pic: Anurag Jain, co-owner of Texas Super Kings, and Aaron Finch, captain of San Francisco Unicorns)•Peter Della Penna”You come to a sport in America, it’s very big,” du Plessis said at the captains’ press conference, held at the Perot Investments HQ in Dallas, in a wing adorned with Texas-sized American flags and massive statues of American bald eagles (H Ross Perot Jr is a co-owner of the Texas Super Kings, and grandson of the late influential Texan billionaire best remembered for his attempted US presidential run against George Bush and Bill Clinton in 1992). “You walk into baseball, and facilities are unbelievable. You walk into a stadium and you go ‘wow’ and you look at it and you go, ‘This could be cricket in America.’ I don’t know how many years it would take to get there, but you look at and see cricket working like it. It’s got a different feel to it than anywhere else in the world.”Something I would like moving forward is to just rub shoulders with these people, whether that’s American football or baseball, just high level elite sportsmen coming together and sharing a dressing room… I think that to grow cricket, you need these other sportspeople to talk about cricket as well because we’re going to need all of the American people to jump on this and actually make this a success.”That means American players too. One of the things absent from the launch press conference was American flavour on the podium. Whereas PSL teams are mostly captained by Pakistan players, IPL teams by Indian players, CPL teams by West Indian players, American players have been mostly relegated to the background in year one.But one of the leading lights for USA on the franchise scene over the last five years has been fast bowler Ali Khan. After making his big splash in the summer of 2018 with Trinbago Knight Riders to propel them to a CPL title, he has turned into a fixture in various other Knight Riders-affiliated squads, including becoming the first American in an IPL squad with Kolkata Knight Riders in 2020. Being part of the Knight Riders lineup on opening night when they take on Texas Super Kings holds extra significance for Khan because he now lives in the state, having moved from Ohio in 2020, and married a Texan girl with Pakistani heritage this past May.
“Playing for Knight Riders, the franchise I’ve been with over the years, and playing in my hometown in Texas where I live now, that’s really exciting. Having your own family members and friends coming to watch, it’s really exciting. Having a facility like this in America, it’s a game-changer.”USA and Knight Riders fast bowler Ali Khan
“It’s a very special moment for cricket in America,” said Khan. “I think it’s going to be a really huge success. A lot of people have been waiting for this to happen over the years. So finally, we have something coming into our own country. I’ve been playing franchise cricket around the world, but having a league in our own backyard, it’s really good and I’m really excited to see it. Ican’t wait to get it started.”Playing for Knight Riders, the franchise I’ve been with over the years, and playing in my hometown in Texas where I live now, that’s really exciting. Having your own family members and friends coming to watch, it’s really exciting. Having a facility like this in America, it’s a game-changer. It can only get better from here.”