Inside U.S. Cricket’s Shocking Victory
21 min read
When the players on the U.S. men’s cricket team showed up at a stadium outside Dallas on the morning of June 6, they were well aware that few people who knew anything about the sport gave them a chance of winning. That the match was even taking place was curiosity enough. Their opponent was Pakistan, one of the great cricketing powers. In Pakistan, cricket is the nation’s most popular sport, whereas in the U.S. many are surprised that America even has a cricket team of its own. The two teams had never faced off before.
The website for USA Cricket contends that “America has one of the richest cricketing histories” of any country, but the argument is a dubious one. A timeline offers a few bright early moments—it notes, for instance, that in 1754, Benjamin Franklin brought a cricket rule book over from England; reports that the very first international cricket match took place in New York (America versus Canada, in 1844); and asserts that, at one time, there were up to 1,000 cricket clubs across the country. But it mostly details the waning of the sport, eclipsed by baseball in American life. From the 1960s onward, descriptions of purported achievements by U.S. national teams almost invariably include a phrase that lets slip the underlying reality: “narrowly miss out,” “bottom of their pool,” “not quite enough.”
Although cricket is said to be the second-most-viewed sport in the world after soccer, those viewers have long been elsewhere. Its popularity has historically been concentrated in the handful of nations that have dominated the sport: India, Pakistan, Australia, England, New Zealand, the West Indies, South Africa.
The event in which the U.S. cricket team was playing this summer was the T20 World Cup, a biannual tournament. The U.S. team had never previously managed to qualify, and even on this occasion, its participation had not been earned on the cricket field. The 2024 World Cup was to be primarily hosted in the West Indies, but 16 early matches would be played in the United States. Cricket is overseen by a global governing body, the International Cricket Council, and this choice was in keeping with one of the ICC’s declared goals, to grow cricket in the American market.
As a co-host, the U.S. cricket team automatically qualified to play in the tournament, beginning with a round robin against four other teams. The U.S. won its first match, against another lesser team: Canada. But in the next two matches, the United States would face Pakistan and another giant of modern cricket, India—opponents who, according to conventional wisdom, would be far beyond it. Finally, the U.S. would take on Ireland. Only the top two teams in the group would move on to the tournament’s next stage. That these would be India and Pakistan was more or less considered a foregone conclusion.
Recently, there had been indications that the U.S. cricket team was making significant steps forward. Still, the players knew, ahead of the Pakistan game, that the odds were heavily stacked against them. As they prepared, they were thinking all the sensible things you think when you need reality to bend in a way you know it probably won’t.
“We knew we wasn’t supposed to win the game,” the opening batsman Steven Taylor told me.
“We wanted to detach ourselves,” the bowler Saurabh Netravalkar told me, “from the star-studded nature of the players that we are playing against.”
“If we upset Pakistan,” Taylor said, “that would be the biggest thing ever in any World Cup.”
“I walked into the game,” said Corey Anderson, who had played his first match for the United States less than two months earlier, “thinking, Yes, there’s a world in which we beat them. There is a world in which we beat them. There’s a lot of worlds where we don’t.”
The commonly expected narrative for how a player comes to represent their country is this: They grow up in that country, learning the sport there, gradually excelling. They rise through the ranks until one day, if their talent is sufficient and all goes as they hope it might, they are selected to play on the national team. That is not the story of the U.S. cricket team. Eleven players took the field on June 6 wearing U.S.-team shirts, and the above narrative just about describes one of them.
That exception is Steven Taylor. He was born in Hialeah, Florida, and raised in nearby Miramar. His parents had met in Jamaica, then moved to the States before he was born. His father worked for a construction company, and his mother worked at the airport until she hurt her back. Club cricket in the United States is typically played among those whose affiliation with the game comes from elsewhere, most usually from the Caribbean and South Asian diasporas, and when Taylor fell into the sport, he was following his father. “Because I love my dad dearly,” he told me, “and he loved cricket as well. So anything my dad wants to do, I was always behind him.”
Taylor, a precocious talent, joined a team in an adult cricket league when he was about 8 years old. It was pretty much all he cared about. “My friends used to call me ‘the cricket guy’ because I used to talk about cricket right through every time of the day,” he said. Inevitably, many of them didn’t really understand what he was talking about.
In his early 20s, Taylor moved to Jamaica to play professional cricket, but when his progress stalled, he moved back. He had another future in mind: to achieve greatness as an American cricketer. “I always had that passion,” he said. He first played for the U.S. in 2010, way before anyone else on the current squad. The team wasn’t always as good as he hoped, but he had no choice but to be patient.
The first moment in the game against Pakistan that suggested something magical might be in the air involved Taylor. It happened about four and a half minutes into the match, one expected to last about three hours. The Pakistani opening batsman Mohammad Rizwan—one of the finest T20 batsmen in the world, a player who, on a different day, might have put the game out of reach all on his own—had already scored nine runs. But then a ball caught the edge of Rizwan’s bat. It careened fairly close to where Taylor was standing, though not close enough for a catch to seem feasible. Taylor dived to his right, and the ball somehow stuck in his hand, just a few inches above the grass. “Oh my goodness!” the TV commentator exclaimed. “What a blinder!”
It was the kind of catch, Taylor now says, he figured he might take two times out of 10. In the aftermath—as he lay on the ground, his teammates swarming around him, only his right arm extended beyond the surrounding melee, the ball still cradled in his hand—he instinctively flicked the ball up and away, as if to say, Look what I just did.
Four and a half minutes after the match had started, the match had started.
Everyone still knew that there was a way that this match was supposed to go, but sometimes what you need most is simply a moment that makes the possible actually seem possible.
A brief word on how a T20 cricket competition works. One team of 11 players fields while the other bats. A bowler from the fielding side bowls six balls, known as an “over,” at one of the two batsmen on the field at any given time. That’s repeated 20 times, and then the teams switch places—so all of the first team’s scoring is finished before the other team comes to bat. If a batsman’s shot is caught by a fielder, or if he misses a ball that hits the posts behind him (called “stumps”), or if other, more complicated misadventures befall him, he is out, and replaced by a new batsman.
Players can qualify for a national cricket team in three ways: by birth, by nationality, and by residence. Until recently, that last rule typically required someone to have lived in a country for seven years before representing it. But in 2018, the ICC reduced the qualification period to three years. This was a crucial shift for the United States. Of the 11 U.S. players who stepped onto the field June 6, five of them qualified to play not through ancestry or birthplace, but through residency. Monank Patel, the team’s captain—and now a U.S. citizen—had originally taken that path too.
Patel was born in India, and grew up near Ahmedabad, in Gujarat State. He started playing cricket when he was 10, and by the time he was 13, he was on the district team. “Schooling, college, and all, I just did for the sake of doing it,” he told me. “I never had a goal to achieve anything from the education point of view.” The only thing he cared about was cricket.
Where Patel lived, in what is probably the most cricket-obsessed nation in the world, there was a surfeit of good players, and it was easy to fall through the cracks. Eventually, he had to accept that the cricketing life he had imagined for himself was not his destiny. He had family in the United States, and already had a green card. In his early 20s, he moved to New Jersey. His extended family ran liquor stores and gas stations, and he started working in the family businesses.
After Patel had spent a year or two in New Jersey, an uncle encouraged him to move to South Carolina, where they opened a franchise of the restaurant chain Teriyaki Madness. When sales slumped, Patel had to double as both manager and chef. (I came across a photo of him there, red apron on, tossing food in a wok. He told me that the best dish was spicy chicken with noodles. When I asked him why it was good, he replied, “Because I used to make it.”) Then he learned that his mother, in New Jersey, had cancer. He returned north, and went back to work in a liquor store.
Since coming to America, Patel had been playing club cricket on the weekends, getting used to the very different conditions of pitches here. In 2018, when he was first eligible, he got the attention of the U.S. team and was invited to try out. He was selected straightaway. Soon, he stopped working at the liquor store. He was a cricketer again.
On June 6, by the end of its 20 overs, Pakistan had scored 159 runs. That was probably less than what Pakistan had expected, and the U.S. team figured it truly had a chance. Then again, it was playing Pakistan. Somebody on the U.S. team needed to make a big score. The opening batsmen were Patel and Taylor. Taylor was counting on himself. Normally, he’s the one who bats more aggressively, while Patel tends to be more conservative. But today, their roles somehow flipped; Taylor stuttered, while runs flowed for Patel. Soon enough, Taylor was out.
Batsmen can score runs one by one, by hitting the ball and running up and down the pitch past each other, as if two baseball players were running back and forth between two bases. Each of these trips counts as a single run. But batsmen can also score in bunches, by hitting the ball to the field’s boundary (four runs) or over the boundary (six runs). Facing Shaheen Afridi—world Cricketer of the Year in 2021—Patel consecutively hit a four, then a six, to reach 50 runs. In celebration, he arched his head back so that he was facing upward, a private gesture to his mother. Before she died, she had watched her son’s second cricket career take off, always encouraging him to be a better person and a better player.
“Every time I score a 50 or 100,” Patel said, “I look up in the sky and just thank her.”
At this point, the U.S. team was well on track to beat Pakistan’s score.
The tradition of writing about cricket in America, and predicting its just-around-the-next-corner rise, has been going on for a long time. There was a fine example in this magazine nearly a quarter century ago: Rob Nixon’s “As American as Cricket” reported optimistically that “a movement has been growing to bring what was once the most English of sports into the American mainstream. It just might succeed.” Nixon highlighted some of the indicators that cricket in America now had the wind at its back—a pilot program under way to get cricket into California schools; Disney’s discussion of building a stadium in Orlando; a stadium already green-lit in Brooklyn, with $30 million raised from private investors.
But, of course, no. There is no cricket stadium in Brooklyn. There is no cricket stadium in Orlando. Away from the growing pockets of the American population who have inherited an affinity for the game from elsewhere, cricket remains a baffling mystery to most. Almost every sport, viewed from the outside, is a mystifying web of complicated rules, practices, and language. But even by this standard, it’s easy to portray cricket as an outlier. Much of its lexicon sounds both unapproachable and, well, just weird: sticky wicket, googly, yorker, jaffa, daisy cutter, silly mid off, maiden over, tickle, nurdle, trundler, paddle scoop, popping crease, golden duck.
Beyond that, the purest version of the game—the one that, to many global cricket fans, remains the Platonic ideal—is only hinted at in the hectic T20 sprints of this World Cup. This much longer version of the game, in its international form known as a “test match,” takes place over several full days of play, rather than a few hours. It is this version of the game that Nixon was talking about when he noted that, after mentioning to an American friend that Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter were ardent cricket fans, he got the memorable retort: “Of course. All that organized futility.”
The U.S. cricket team has never even played a test match. (These are reserved for the 12 countries good enough, and with sufficient cricketing infrastructure, to be deemed “Full-Member Nations” by the ICC; the United States is a mere “Associate Member.”) A quicker, one-day version of the game, in which each side bats for 50 or 60 overs, developed only in the 1970s, when it was widely considered a controversial oversimplification. The even shorter, more TV-friendly 20-over format of the T20 World Cup was introduced this century.
In no version of the game has a U.S. team made any significant impact. No wonder many cricket fans around the world might be only dimly aware that a U.S. cricket team exists. Or maybe not even aware at all. Including, it turns out, some of those eligible to play for it.
Aaron Jones was born in Queens, to parents who had moved there from Barbados. When Jones was 3 or 4, his mother, fed up with the cold winters, insisted they move back to Barbados. There, he excelled at soccer and cricket, but he bowed to his parents’ wisdom that, for a Caribbean boy, the prospects were better for a cricketer.
In October 2018, Jones went to a cricket match in Barbados with some friends, as a spectator. It was part of a minor regional tournament in which Jones had expected to play for the Barbados team, but this time hadn’t been selected. In that day’s game, the U.S. team was playing. “I didn’t know that U.S.A. had a team,” Jones told me. He did, however, personally know one of its players, Steven Taylor; they’d bonded in an earlier competition over their shared Caribbean heritage. That day, Taylor spotted Jones in the crowd and messaged him after the game, inviting him to hang out at his hotel. That evening shifted the path of Jones’s life.
In the course of conversation, Jones mentioned that he had a U.S. passport. Taylor was surprised. “He was like, ‘So why don’t you just come and play for U.S.?’” Jones recalled. This, it soon became clear, wasn’t some vague, airy notion. By the time Jones got home, he said that he had messages from three or four members of the U.S. cricket board. The next day, he was invited to practice. A few days later, he made his first appearance in a U.S. shirt. He’s been a regular on the team ever since, and is currently the national team’s vice captain.
In the June 6 Pakistan game, after Monank Patel reached his 50, he was out without scoring another run. The challenge to finish the job now fell to Jones and another of their best batsmen, Nitish Kumar.
What followed was the kind of yo-yo, tension-and-release breathtaking suspense that sporting events can sometimes supply. At certain moments, it seemed like the U.S. might win with ease; at others, it seemed almost impossible. Eventually, the contest came down to this: The team needed six runs from the last two balls to be bowled. From the first of these two balls, Jones scored one run. Then, from the final ball, Kumar miraculously scored four.
Given the high numbers involved in cricket scores, a tie is a rare event, but the teams were now tied. An equally rare protocol, known as a Super Over, kicks in when this happens. Effectively, what follows is a whole new competition of just one over per team. Six balls. Whichever team scores the most, wins.
It was up to Patel, and to the team’s Australian coach, Stuart Law, to decide who should bat and who should bowl. They chose Jones as one of the two batsmen; he would face the first ball. Jones remembered feeling that 10 runs was the minimum he wanted for the Super Over, though he was hoping they’d get 12. But it went better than that: His shots flowed, and the Pakistani team, seemingly rattled, made mistakes. “Everything worked in my favor that day,” Jones said.
In the Super Over, the U.S. scored 18 runs; the team was nearly there.
A telltale peculiarity of the U.S. cricket team is what its players informally call the “no Hindi” rule. They have agreed that all shared conversations will be in English. Those who slip up are fined $20 for each violation, money put toward the team beer fund. Though the “no Hindi” shorthand presumably acknowledges the fact that seven of the full 15-man World Cup squad were primarily raised in India, there are other shared tongues too, each to be avoided.
“If I speak in my full Caribbean slang,” Jones said, “they wouldn’t understand. So they see us as disrespectful … And then if they speak Hindi, I can’t understand, or if they speak Urdu, I can’t understand, or if the Afrikaans speak Afrikaans, then we can’t understand.”
“If we’re playing for America,” Taylor explained, “we only talk one language.”
Each player on the U.S. team has followed his own pathway to where he now finds himself. But if there is a theme that tends to repeat, it is that, whatever the chain of circumstances, the U.S. team represents a second chance in many of the players’ cricketing lives—one that emerged, in some cases, long after the first chance had evaporated. Corey Anderson, for instance, was a young cricket star in New Zealand whose career had waned; his second chance opened up only after he was stranded in Dallas with his girlfriend (now wife) during the pandemic, when he signed a contract to play in the upstart Major League Cricket. (A typical MLC contract is in the neighborhood of $60,000, though stronger players can command six figures.)
Saurabh Netravalkar’s story is of the same kind. He grew up in Mumbai, playing street cricket with a tennis ball in the backyards of apartment buildings, and in time he was selected for India’s under-19 squad, enjoying early success. But from the start, Netravalkar also excelled academically, and loved that too. In 2013, after graduating with a computer-engineering degree, he faced a difficult decision about what to do professionally. He chose cricket, but his career didn’t take off as he’d hoped. “There are so many good cricketers in India,” he told me. “It was frustrating. I used to get low sometimes.”
So after two years, Netravalkar reversed his decision. “It was a very emotional call for me,” he said, “because my dream was always to grow up and play for the country, play for India.” Instead, he decided to get a master’s in computer science at Cornell. When Netravalkar flew out of Mumbai, he left his cricket spikes somewhere in the attic of his family home.
In this other life, Netravalkar prospered. After Cornell, he was hired by Oracle, and moved to the Bay Area. In 2019, he and a colleague were granted a patent for a novel method of doing wildcard searches. (One sentence from the patent’s abstract: “In an embodiment, a plurality of query K-gram tokens for a term in a query are generated.”) But Netravalkar was wrong to imagine he’d leave cricket completely behind him.
After he settled into his job, he started playing club cricket seriously on the weekends. Matches in the Bay Area were played on synthetic pitches, a poor substitute for a serious cricketer, so he soon got into a routine where he and a few teammates would drive six hours to Los Angeles on Friday night, play a Saturday game on a proper grass pitch, then drive straight back to the Bay Area for another game on Sunday. “And back to work on Monday,” he said.
Netravalkar had some club teammates who played for the U.S. team, but as he understood it, the applicable qualification period was seven years. Then, just as he reached the end of his third year here, the eligibility rules changed. Without an invitation, he flew himself to a team training camp in Los Angeles. A few months later, he got the call.
Netravalkar has continued his other career, at Oracle. For the 2024 World Cup, he initially arranged to be away from work until June 17. If the U.S. progressed in the tournament, he would have to ask for a further extension.
On June 6, he did plenty to make this more likely. It was a ball off his bowling that Taylor caught after four and a half minutes, that first hint that this might be their day. Now, right at the end of the match, Netravalkar was chosen to bowl the Super Over: to deliver six balls that would end in either victory or defeat.
From the moment Netravalkar’s first ball managed to evade the bat, Pakistan’s task, already steep, became nearly impossible. Then, on the third ball, one of the Pakistani batsmen was out after a fine diving catch near the boundary from the substitute fielder Milind Kumar. That was more or less it. Minutes later, the result was official. As the Karachi-based news site Dawn would summarize it: “In a downright embarrassing moment that will go down in Pakistani cricket history, our cricket team lost to the United States.” The match earned rare attention from American outlets too; CNN called it a “shock defeat.”
The crowd in Grand Prairie that day was sparse, but to sounds of surprised celebration, one of the American players lifted a grinning Netravalkar into the air.
“Slowly it digested,” Netravalkar said, “that this was a historic win.”
“We were out of the moon,” Patel said. “Out of the world, I would say.”
Briefly, cricket in America was a hot ticket, though this had less to do with what the U.S. had just achieved than with the team it was to play next: India. This game was scheduled six days later in a temporary stadium on Long Island that had been built for the tournament. The evening before the match, on the tournament’s official ticket site, the remaining few seats at the back of the grandstand cost $300; everything else was $1,000 or more.
At first sight, most spectators that day were wearing or holding something that identified them as supporting India. Closer up, a more complicated story became apparent. A small but significant subset were also carrying U.S.-team merchandise. As the day began to heat up, someone sitting near me took off their Indian-team shirt, revealing a U.S shirt underneath.
Before the match, a presenter, live on the big screens, was shown wandering around talking to people in the crowd. One woman, holding an American flag but wearing an Indian shirt, explained to him that she was born in India but lives here. “Definitely rooting for both teams,” she declared. The interviewer, failing to overcome a lifetime’s experience of partisanship, blurted out in response, “That’s not how sport works!” But here, today, it seemed to.
The high point for the U.S. team came when Netravalkar bowled his first over. The Indian batsman Virat Kohli is probably the most famous cricketer currently playing the game. But Netravalkar’s first ball to him deftly swung away and was edged off Kohli’s bat into the safe hands of another U.S. player. Kohli had been dismissed first ball for no runs, the humiliation known as a golden duck.
As Kohli departed and the new batsman made his way onto the field while the stadium DJ played “Empire State of Mind,” there was briefly a waft of something in the air. But soon enough, India eased back into control. As the game progressed, people continued to cheer U.S. achievements almost as heartily as Indian ones; I have a hunch that might have changed if the result had felt in jeopardy, but it never did, and soon the Indian victory, to no one’s surprise, was comfortably completed.
With one further match to play, the math was now simple. To advance to the next stage, the U.S. had to beat Ireland. Two days later, a modest crowd filed into Central Broward Stadium, in Florida. It had rained earlier that morning, and the field was still considered too wet for play. Should the game be called off, the U.S. team would proceed into the tournament’s next round by default. Nearly three hours after the scheduled start, the skies opened—“Thankfully,” Anderson told me, “mother cricket had the rain come in”—and the match was canceled.
When the U.S. players arrived at their hotel, the mood was good. Qualifying for this next stage of the tournament, known as the Super 8s, is a big deal. It not only meant that they would travel to Antigua and Barbados to play three more of the world’s top teams: South Africa, the West Indies, and England. It also meant—both for the team and, more important, for the enduring growth of cricket in America—that they automatically qualified for the next World Cup.
By definition, tournaments like the T20 World Cup eventually end in defeat and disappointment for all but one team. Once the U.S. team reached the Caribbean, things soon unraveled. It ran South Africa close, but then was pulverized by the West Indies and England. It would play no further part. (India would ultimately triumph in a thrilling seesaw final against South Africa; Kohli, the Indian hero, would be top scorer and man of the match, his momentary humiliation against the U.S. long forgotten.)
Still, the past few weeks had clearly changed the narrative about American cricket. The hope is that everything builds from here: that the attention is sustained, then grows; that the flimsy national infrastructure improves, in terms of both facilities and instruction; that a wider segment of the population learns the game; that the U.S. cricket team goes further at the 2026 T20 World Cup, and shines in front of home crowds at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, where cricket will be included for the first time (well, if you ignore, as you probably should, the two-team Olympic competition between England and France in 1900).
And if it turns out to be nothing but a blip? If someone, a quarter century from now, goes through these words and points out everything that was expected to follow, and didn’t? Well, magical blips are to be celebrated too. In fact, they’re one of the greatest gifts that sports offer to memory. Because, whatever comes after, this happened. On June 6, the Pakistan and U.S. cricket teams played each other for the very first time.
“It’s almost like I don’t think guys understood what they’d done,” Anderson said. “How we won the game, I think, was what made it even sweeter. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh my God, we fluked that; we got lucky’… It was a little bit more of: ‘We actually just beat Pakistan.’ Pakistan didn’t lose to the U.S.A. U.S.A. beat Pakistan.”
