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Kamal Dheer poses in standard cricket gear, which includes a flat, wooden bat, leg pads and gloves. Photos by Sam Rao.

The Cricket Invasion

Bay Area cricket leagues gain popularity

By Sam Rao
Special to AsianWeek

Players in white playing with a bat and ball may sound familiar to Americans, but when 11 voices cry “Howwzzat?” while looking at the umpire, you know that cricket has arrived in the Bay Area.

A very popular sport in Britain and its former colonies, cricket is played with a flat, long handled bat and a stitched leather ball — smaller than a baseball — and teams are comprised of 11 players each, which includes a designated catcher, or “wicket-keeper.”

The Bay Area boasts over 20 teams in a two-tiered league with competitors in San Jose, Fremont, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto/Stanford and Berkeley, as well as Marin. These teams can be seen competing every week on various high school and university fields, especially during the summer under the auspices of the Northern California Cricket Association (NCCA) and Bay Area Cricket Alliance (BACA).

In fact, cricket in the United States has become so popular that this year saw the first national cricket tournaments, one held in San Francisco in the spring and the latest held in Los Angeles during Labor Day weekend with attendance pushing 500.

An afternoon cricket match ensues in Hayward, Calif.

Immigrants to the United States have carried this love for the sport across the world.

“I miss live cricket,” says Ashwini Deo, from Bombay, an avid cricket-watcher and daughter of an cricket umpire in India. “And since I moved to California, I am happy to see [cricket] every weekend, just like [in] Bombay. The quality here is not bad.”

Cricket players from former rival countries are often teammates here — a definite testament to the melting pot syndrome. It is totally normal to see a Pakistani immigrant as captain of a team consisting of cricket players who hail from India, Australia and Canada.

Cricket was deemed a “genteel” sport and exported by Britain to all its colonies. Initially played only by the ruling class, the sport permeated into the culture of the occupied population, and since then has been adopted as a thriving sports industry in most of the commonwealth countries. Teams from India, Pakistan, West Indies, Australia and New Zealand have competed in World Series regularly, while countries like Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, South Africa — to name a few — have joined the “expansion team” era of the cricketing world.

Traditionally played over a five-day period, with breaks for tea, lunch and “drinks,” this game suited the leisurely pace of colonial masters. In traditional cricket, teams could play for five days and the final result could still be a draw!

This luxury format of the sport inexplicably still remains popular. Folks remain glued to their radio sets or TVs, often bringing the workforce to a standstill when popular cricketers are batting.

The similarity to baseball starts and ends with the use of a bat and a ball and 11 players in white. In cricket, the pitcher is called the “bowler,” and the pitches are allowed one-bounce — which means balls can be curved through the air or spun one bounce from right to left or left to right. The bowler pitches six times, after which a new pitcher starts at the opposite end. The cricket bat is a flat, wooden paddle with a long handle. The batsmen wear shin pads, gloves and sometimes helmets. There are only two bases, and two batsmen run between the bases. Each time the opposite base is reached, a run is scored and the batsmen continue batting. One strike is an out, and you can get caught out by a fielder or tagged off the bases just like in baseball.

Now comes the interesting part: The entire ground is “fair,” meaning you can hit all around the field, including behind the catcher or wicket-keeper. For an inning to be completed, the entire team bats once around before the other teams batters troop in. Runs are scored in singles, twos or threes by running between the bases, or if the ball crosses the circular boundary. The team that scores the most runs without getting all its players struck out wins. Typically one-day cricket games can be a 40-over (an over is the equivalent to a baseball inning) or 20-over match, with six pitches to an over, which guarantees a result in one day.

Sunnyvale boasts a city-sanctioned cricket pitch, maintained by the local Sunnyvale cricketers. As community service, the resident cricketers hold regular cricket camps for 13-year-olds from the local school system.

Until about five years ago, Naz movie theater — a popular Asian hangout in Fremont — showed the World Series of cricket to packed audiences, which constituted mostly Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan and Australian expatriates. Cable TV since then has made inroads into the theater audiences, but cricket-viewing via cable still remains very popular.

“The U.S. is our biggest subscription market for Wisden Online cricket,” says Yajurvinder Singh of Wisden Online, who served as a chief guest for the NCAA tournament. Wisden Cricket is an UK-based company owned by Sir Paul Getty, and publishes a popular cricket almanac.

Some former national players like Faoud Bacchus (West Indies) and Syed Abid Ali (India) have made the Bay Area their home and remain involved in the sport as advisors to the cricket leagues.

The influx of young South Asian immigrants boosted the game in the Bay Area with formal and informal games galore. In fact, there even is a “tennis ball” cricket league, played with a special (heavier) tennis ball, which is very popular in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The tennis ball poses its own interesting challenge of control and hitting. The tennis ball cricket league is still in its infancy, but already 32 teams have registered for the annual tournament that started Sept. 8.

At a weekend game, Ajay Pal Singh, the organizer of the tennis ball cricket tournament, said, “We want to keep the game alive as a recreation and keep the love of the sport alive without too much bureaucracy, and tap into the tremendous popularity of the sport.”