Nowadays there is nothing at the corner of 1st and 33rd to suggest that cricket was once played in this corner of Kips Bay, Manhattan. On one side of the road sits the squat grey office block of the New York University Medical Centre, and facing it is a low-rise parking lot. In the 19th century this was the site of St George’s Cricket Club. It was here, underneath the foundations of the Medical Centre, that the very first international cricket match was played between Canada and the USA. That was in 1844, 33 years before England first played Australia. The match drew a crowd of around 5,000.
166 years on, and that is still the record for the largest single attendance at a cricket match in New York.

Cricket’s popularity in the US peaked in the 1850s before being checked by civil war, which broke out in 1861. The theory goes that it was a lot easier for soldiers to arrange an impromptu game of baseball than it was cricket. It is a lot simpler, after all, to throw down four satchels as bases than it is to lay a rough wicket and mark out a boundary. After the war cricket became ghettoised, confined to small pockets of the country around Chicago, San Francisco, New York, St Louis and Philadelphia. Here, for a time, the sport thrived. Philadelphia were one of the great club sides of the Golden Age, twice beating touring Australian Test teams.

But as Philadelphia’s glory years faded into memory through the 20th century, so participation dwindled across the US. And ever since, administrators, entrepeneurs and businessmen have been dreaming of tapping the residue of the USA’s cricket-playing population. There are pioneers in cricket, just as there are in football and rugby union, who seem to believe that the sport has a manifest destiny in the west. This despite the obvious apathy of the mainstream market. “Rule of thumb,” wrote sports columnist Greg Cote in the Miami Herald last week, “if your sport is named after a grasshopper-like bug, give it a new name.” Cote added, in a telling aside: “Still trying to figure out why Broward County agreed to fund a $70m cricket stadium in Lauderhill. I believe the expenditure was OK’d that one day all of the county commissioners showed up for work drunk.” Cote was writing about cricket because, on 22 and 23 May Sri Lanka and New Zealand played two Twenty20 matches at that same stadium, the first purpose-built cricket ground in the USA.
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