The Cricket World Cup opens in Texas, an American hotbed for the sport

“On the fields we have now, you can play every weekend, and more are still coming,” said Kishore Bandlamuri, 33, in Houston since 2018 after growing up in India’s colossus of Hyderabad and also in a championship.

Told over coffee that a visitor had mapped 22 pitches around the giant city, Houston restaurant magnate, philanthropist and cricket pitch financier Tanweer Ahmed replied: “Now there are actually more. More than thirty now.

All together, if they are scattered, they say that the second most important sport in the world is experiencing a period of American burgeoning just as the T20 Cricket World Cup begins Saturday near Dallas before running until June in the Caribbean and the United States.

Far east of downtown Houston, in Baytown, they play on the grass between a soccer field and four baseball diamonds in front of a water park with occasional screams coming from the slide. An hour west of there, across the expanse, in a park in the town of Stafford, just beyond six occupied basketball hoops in a tidy pavilion, there is a tournament of cricket with a table full of trophies awaiting their various shelves, plus the always welcome fact that someone has brought a big drum.

The cricket hunting map is dotted with world-class, well-manicured grounds and unkempt, unassuming fields. Sakhi Muhammad, who built the Moosa Cricket Stadium in Pearland a decade ago when those around him questioned its balance, notes that more than 50 teams in greater Houston “play with the hard ball,” as it is used in advanced competitions, and more than 100 “play with the hard ball”. play softball cricket,” using a rubber ball or tennis ball wrapped in electrical tape. Waleed Zaman, a 22-year-old whose family migrated from Peshawar, Pakistan, 12 years ago, said: “The growth has been immense because when I started getting interested in cricket, there had far fewer teams than Houston has now. »

It now notes six leagues, one premier and five amateur, as well as other “Saturday leagues” in which players could get their skills noticed.

There’s also this: “In Houston,” Naqi said, “there’s a lot of parking lot cricket. »

Cricket has neither shaken King American Football nor taken its eyes off the Astros, and it’s easy to live in a vast city without noticing it. But as South Asian immigrants arrived in increasing numbers and helped fuel Houston’s dazzling diversity, the cricket fields joined the tapestry.

They are there, on the boulevards and back roads, near convenience stores with gas pumps or farms with horses standing in the heat or a towing company called “All-America” ​​or a bakery with sweets from the Indian state of Kerala or placards for election candidates or charter schools, churches, used car sales. Or they’re in the middle of farmland in Wallis, west of the city, where six light poles rise along two-lane roads and occasional houses and those who play there talk of fog and dew casuals that add to the voluminous nuances of cricket.

Along a short stretch of busy Sugar Land road that screams the area’s diversity, there is an Islamic center, an “Iglesia Christiana,” a Buddhist temple, an Assembly of God church called Firebrand and then, tucked behind a stone apartment complex, a beautiful cricket ground.

In a park quite northwest of downtown Houston, an attractive bulletin board screams a bit of cosmopolitanism. He is ready to track runs, overs and wickets.

About 53 sometimes slow miles northwest of the city, the Prairie View Cricket Complex, with its six fields, hosted high-profile matches between the United States and Bangladesh last weekend. It organized a women’s tournament in April. He organized a university tournament bringing together 26 teams in March. It can accommodate 10,000 people and benefits from a grass surface, which is expensive to maintain but which gives Ahmed “a bit of pride” because of its level of quality. As Naqi said, it’s “a real installation” where “you can see the ball behave differently.”

The ground and the international matches held there as well as the T20 World Cup in the United States are “a dream come true, to be honest with you,” said Ahmed, a Houstonian since 2007 and based in the United States since 1988 with a herculean profile. life story from childhood poverty in a village near Sialkot, Pakistan, to one of his many highs in 2018 when he purchased the first 14 acres of the land. “I never thought it would get this far. It all started with me literally trying to play the game myself, then all of a sudden I decided to buy more and more land.

Back in the city and south of its center in Pearland, Muhammad’s Moosa Stadium has a referee’s room, commentary room, media center, VIP box and more Again.

“The majority of my community and business people were telling me, ‘Look, you’re doing something that’s not going to happen,'” said Muhammad, a Houstonian since 1996 and originally from Karachi, Pakistan. “Cricket is going nowhere. » » And so: “I was called crazy 10 years ago. » And now, “Sometimes not all dreams come true, but this one did.” » He notes that Moosa has hosted 12 one-day international matches in 2022 alone.

At Babar Noor’s high school, the other kids know that he and another student are cricket players, but can seem unclear on what precisely that means. On a recent Sunday, Noor carpooled from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. with four other players from Clear Lake, well south-southeast of downtown Houston, to Katy, well northwest. “I feel lucky,” he said of participating, the World Cup and everything else.

“I wish there was a high school team, but that’s OK,” said Noor, 17, born in Houston to parents from Karachi. “That’s the one thing I wish there was.”

In fact, there was a sense of pleasant surprise among many players during Sunday’s game on Katy Field.

“So basically when I came (to the United States 12 years ago), my thought was, ‘Am I going to play cricket?’ Is it as common as here in India? said Nadir Husain, 35, a native of Hyderabad, who migrated at 23 to do his master’s degree. “To my surprise, my university (Houston Clear Lake) had a cricket team, competing regionally and nationally.”

The meaning of just landing here has changed in cricketing terms.

“People who moved here 30 or 40 years ago didn’t expect this to happen in the United States,” said Pradeep Dasu, 24, also from Hyderabad, who has been here for three years. He now sees “every country” with “its own group of players playing in Houston”, meaning in particular the Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans.

Sairam Mandhadi, 31, originally from Hyderabad and in the United States for the past 18 months, said he found more cricket available to ordinary players in Houston than in India. “I feel really lucky to be a part of Houston,” he said. In fact, he stopped playing around age 22, then moved to a neighborhood near the Texans’ NRG Stadium, where many Indian students reside.

“That’s where I got the push again,” he said. “That’s the main reason I love this city. And I just feel like I won’t go anywhere else! Trust me.”

This has led him into an unexpected wonderland of cricket alongside his career in IT, which often means obsessing during the week if he happens to come out with one, two or a few balls during a match and chatting about cricket at social functions, or his wife sometimes asks him if he can discuss other topics.

“Believe me, even my family members get very bored when we get together because all the boys talk about cricket,” he said.

So they gather together. “It’s about being together,” Bandlamuri said, “and it’s also about being together with the other team,” often with nationalities they wouldn’t have met except in this crucible.

And they monitor the conditions. “On Sunday, the grass wasn’t cut because we just had a storm,” said Naimesh Patel, 42, in Houston since 2014 and a former U.S. soldier. “So it was hindering the ball. The second thing is that there was a crosswind for the last half hour, so I was able to take advantage of that in my bowling.

And they feel deep feelings like nostalgia. “It’s a game where you kind of forget about everything external because you’re so focused on the game,” Husain said. “Those two to three hours are just for the game, and then you come back to reality.”

Then, in the weeks ahead, they all turn their attention to the latest T20 World Cup, the quickest and newest of the three major forms of cricket, designed to lasso a limited attention span with its matches of around three hours. Texas A&M student Samad Alnawaz, 21, born in Galveston to parents from Karachi, will travel with friends to Grand Prairie, near Dallas, for the June 6 match between the United States and Pakistan. “I don’t miss an opportunity to see Pakistan for the first time,” said the lifelong American.

There is a thoughtful plan in place. They will travel to Dallas-Fort Worth the day before. They will sleep a little. Then, as close to dawn as possible, they will reach the stadium, located next to Lone Star Racetrack and its walls emblazoned with the banners of the six U.S. Major League Cricket teams. They don’t want to miss warm-ups.

“Going there, seeing what they do before the game, it’s as fun as the game itself,” said Alnawaz, who plans to be there “maybe eight hours straight.”

Shortly after, in a faraway place – Long Island – another notable match occurs.

“Imagine June 9, when Pakistan plays India,” Ahmed said. “I guarantee 1.5 billion people will watch the show around the world. Who would have thought in 2016 that in 2024 we would be hosting international matches here? It’s incredible. It’s a very good feeling.