Cricket ready to strike gold in the land of opportunity

Investors who made fortunes in Silicon Valley are behind latest attempt to put the sport into US mainstream

- Andy Bull

Manhattan's skyscrapers are built on cricket fields. There was one under Pier 17 at the Seaport on the East River, another beneath the North Meadow of Central Park, and a third on 1st Avenue and East 32nd St, below the car park of NYU's Langone Medical Center.

In 1844, a crowd of about 5,000 New Yorkers watched the first international match there, between the USA and Canada.

"Cricket was the first modern team sport in America," says Chuck Ramkissoon, in Joseph O'Neill's great New York novel Netherland, "a bona fide American pastime". He's right. It was, once.

There were dozens, even hundreds, of clubs in the US in the middle of the 19th century. Historians have never settled on a single reason why cricket died there. The civil war was one factor.

"We had a large number of good young men playing the game up to that time, and then the war fever took over them," one player wrote in the American Cricketer at the beginning of the 20th century.

Baseball was an easier game for the soldiers to pick up and play because it didn't need a rolled wicket, specialist coaching or equipment. When they made it professional in 1869, it was packaged and sold as the indigenous American sport. The patriots' game.

There were places where they carried on playing cricket, around Philadelphia in particular, but even that scene sputtered out during the first world war.

Which made Netherland a hard novel to sell. "When I was writing it, people would ask: 'What's it about?"" says O'Neill. "I'd say: 'It's about cricket in New York, and people didn't know what to say back."