It takes a while to discover locals aware of the tournament but the neighbourhood of Valley Ranch is talking about little else
It’s easy enough to find the little cricket ground hosting the opening game of the T20 World Cup, just take a right when you get to the three enormous chrome dinosaurs outside Ripley’s Believe it Or Not! and follow the road round past its multicoloured replica of the Taj Mahal. The harder part is finding anyone who knows anything about what they’re doing over there under the floodlights. “It’s dead today,” says the lady behind the car rental desk at Dallas Fort Worth international airport. “Is there anything going on this weekend?” Her colleague doesn’t look up. “Nope,” he says, “I checked.”
The T20 World Cup has arrived in the USA with all the fanfare of a broken kazoo. Whatever else the ICC spent its Saudi oil sponsorship on, it isn’t on-the-ground advertising here in Dallas. The 28 June Popsicle Parade in Saddlehorn Park has a bigger billboard presence on the streets around the ground. It’s only when you get inside the venue that you’d know there’s a World Cup on.
The place itself is pretty enough, a little 6,000-seat arena in a patch of empty parkland. It was built as a baseball stadium, and was, once upon a time, the home of the late Texas Airhogs. They folded in 2020. American Cricket Enterprises, the company behind Major League Cricket, spent $21m repurposing the venue. “Hopefully, when you walk in on June 1st, you’re going to feel like you could be in any full member country, in the world,” MLC’s CEO Vijay Srinivasan told me. “That’s what we’ve aspired to do, and you know, we’ve done it with a very small team and without spending a lot of money.”
They’ve had a tough time in the last few days. There have been severe storms in Dallas and flash floods and power outages in the area on Thursday. The USA’s scheduled practice match against Nepal was washed out, and there’s more bad weather forecast for the weekend. But the place seems in pretty good trim despite it all, and the squad managed an hour of practice on the outfield in the morning, while the technical crews beavered away on the necessaries for the broadcast of their opening match against Canada (Sunday 1.30am BST start). The two teams first played each other in 1844. It’s the oldest rivalry in the sport. And the most obscure.
The waitress in the hotel over the road just shrugs. The mailwoman who had just pulled up says yes, she likes cricket because she moved here from Trinidad, but she doesn’t know what’s going on in the stadium. None of the six customers who make up the lunchtime rush in the Mexican place next door have the faintest idea, but one of them wonders if it isn’t something to do with the game they play at the college up the way. They went back to talking about the Mavericks, and their chances against the Timberwolves in the playoffs. Cricket? Crickets.
I beat on, looking for someone, anyone, who knew there was a World Cup on. After four hours, and 15 miles’ drive, I finally find him in the parking lot of the Swadeshi Plaza grocery store in the neighbourhood of Valley Ranch. His name is Dilip, he was born in Nepal, and he is the proud owner of a ticket for their match against the Netherlands on Tuesday. He even pulls out his mobile phone to prove it. He is absolutely convinced that England need to pick that “little left-armer who plays for Punjab Kings” (Sam Curran) if they want to get anywhere in the tournament.
Valley Ranch is a large part of why MLC made a home here. It’s a planned community which was built in the 1970s but has come, through a couple of decades of chain migration, to be home to a huge Indian American community. According to the 2020 census, over a third of the locals here have Indian ancestry, and over a sixth were born in India. The corner stores here stock Thums Up not Coca-Cola, and have little kitchens round the back selling homemade samosas and dosas, pani puri and vada pav. The people I meet in Valley Ranch are surprised when I ask if they know about the World Cup, too, but only because they wonder how anyone could imagine they didn’t.
At the Valley Ranch Islamic Centre, Tariq, the operations manager, is full of talk about Saturday night. It isn’t the opening match he is interested in, but an event with Pakistan’s Babar Azam and Mohammad Rizwan at the nearby mosque in East Plano. Come back here after the evening prayers, he says to me, and everyone you meet will be talking about the tournament. You wouldn’t necessarily guess unless you happened to pass when people are playing, but there are cricket grounds all around this part of the city, including Sandy Lake, Lone Star, Trinity View and Polo Grounds. There’s a thriving weekend league, even an indoor school.
The fact you have to go looking for it tells you everything you need to know about the game’s negligible mainstream status here, and explains why so many people in US cricket worry whether it will ever get away from being seen as a migrant pastime. But then, given there are already five million people in the Indian American diaspora, you have to wonder why that really matters. Valley Ranch is just as much America as any other corner of the country, and the young Americans here love it just as much as the kids in other neighbourhoods do basketball, baseball, or any of the other games everyone else will be watching this weekend.
