The American dream that was allowed to fade

The editor of Cricket Statistician analyses recent events

The ICC aims to spread cricket beyond the traditional cricket playing nations, though generally any spreading seems to be the product of other factors rather than obvious efforts from on high.

Historically, cricket followed the British flag, and that was the case for all the current full members, with the game having been implanted in the indigenous population.

Afghanistan – where the game initially spread in refugee camps in Pakistan – could well be the first Test country where the game was not implanted by the British Empire.

The history of the last 50 years or so since the ICC took its first peek at the game beyond the Test world is a history of the rise and fall of the game in different countries, with the fading away in many places: Kenya and Fiji, for example, have seen a blossoming of the game followed by failure.

These thoughts were engendered by looking at the composition of the ICC World Cricket League Division 3, currently in action in Uganda, which includes both Canada and the USA. The other teams are Oman, Malaysia, Singapore and Uganda.

The USA and Canada should have been cricket playing countries on the basis that the game was introduced from Britain and indeed it started well enough.

Cricket flourished (up to a point) in North America in the distant past, and the first recorded international match was between teams calling themselves Canada and the USA in 1844.

The USA had cricket along the Eastern seaboard, particularly of course Philadelphia (at one time of at least first-class standard), but also Boston and New York.

In Canada in 1867 cricket was declared the national game by the then Prime Minister, John Macdonald.

According to Wikipedia, cricket is now Canada’s fastest growing sport with over 40,000 participants, but the rating of the national team has slipped badly, from playing in the World Cup as recently as 2011 to a current standing in Division 3 of the WCL. What went wrong?

In the USA, the usual explanation is that the game lost out to the simpler baseball (it had clearly continued in some strength after the War of Independence), while in Canada it possibly fell victim to the short season, with ice hockey eventually becoming Canada’s national sport.

Traditionally, the teams of both Canada and the USA, such as they were, were drawn from the English-descended part of the population, but that has been changing for some time, and the current playing squads of both USA and Canada are drawn entirely from first or second generation immigrants from the Caribbean or from the Indian subcontinent.

People of these ethnic origins – among the most recent immigrant streams – form a very small part of the population of either country, probably not enough for the mainstream media to respond to significantly.

So, like for instance kabaddi in Britain, it remains a game played by migrants.