Guest post: Cricket in America

On Sydney 1994, Lionel Messi, Satya Nadella, Baby AB, Father Time, and much more...

As a teenager growing up in South Africa in the 1990s, one of the most eagerly anticipated sports viewing rituals was waking up at 1 am during the December/January summer holidays to watch South Africa’s test cricket team battle against the vaunted Australian team of that period. This occurred in cycles every 3-4 years and left an indelible mark on my sports-viewing psyche. Of course, the initial euphoria of ‘Sydney 1994’ subsequently gave way to 15 years of Australian dominance with the odd memorable individual South African moment – such as allrounder Jacques Kallis’s maiden test century in Melbourne in 1997 – sprinkled in between.

Fortunately, the wheel turned, and by the mid-2000s, South Africa had started to assemble a core of exceptional test cricketers initially headlined by captain and opening batsman Graeme Smith, the incomparable Kallis, star batsmen Hashim Amla and AB de Villiers, as well as speed merchant Dale Steyn. This group was later complemented by new pace kingpin Kagiso Rabada, seam bowling surgeon Vernon Philander, and stylish yet obdurate middle-order batsman Faf du Plessis. On the 2008/09 tour Down Under, South Africa became the first team in 16 years to breach Australia’s impenetrable home fortress (2-1), previously achieved by the last vestige of the great West Indies test team on their 1992/93 tour to Australia. Two more South African series wins in Australia followed in 2012/13 (1-0) and 2016/17 (2-1), making that three consecutive away series wins against this particular sporting enemy – an unprecedented feat.

This latter period was certainly most satisfying as a South African test cricket-loving purist. Graeme Smith’s team was formally recognised as the best test team in the world during the early 2010s, and achieving such sustained success in the long form of the game made up for all the cricket World Cup heartbreak experienced over the years, which persists to this day. (Side note: it took a lot of courage to revisit that dark place at the end of the preceding link. Proceed with caution.) And so we fast forward to South Africa’s most recent test tour to Australia, played over the 2022/23 holiday season after a six-year hiatus which included a global pandemic and shifts in the cricket calendar. Given the rich history of these encounters for me personally, as well as the fact that South Africa had not lost in Australia for seventeen years, I was quite surprised to find that my own emotional state of mind in anticipation of this series could be summarised in two words: complete apathy.

Why was this? Could it be that I had finally matured out of juvenile sporting fandom at the age of 40? Hah! Maturity? Who are we kidding? Was it simply the realisation that South Africa was experiencing a down cycle in test cricket after the retirements of Smith, Kallis, Amla, De Villiers and Steyn? Supporting undermanned South African teams had never stopped me before (incidentally; South Africa predictably lost this most recent series 2-0, with only a rain-shortened third test allowing them to stave off an Australian whitewash). Was it the string of off-field administrative problems – many of which I would argue were self-induced – which plagued South African cricket in the preceding few years? Probably not. Instead, it was the realisation that something had changed permanently. Allow me to explain.

For this, we need to turn to July 2023 and the arrival of the latest stop on the Global T20 circuit, Major League Cricket. This two-week tournament has been framed as an ambitious attempt to grow cricket in the world’s largest sports market, namely the United States of America. Observers from traditional cricket nations might be inclined to view this as a futile expansionist venture into a territory with very little appetite for or history with the game. However, there is no denying the fact that the tournament has some significant backing from a group of investors which include Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella. But the most notable backer is the Indian Premier League (IPL) – cricket’s richest T20 tournament founded in 2008, and which has since firmly entrenched itself at the centre of cricket’s universe.

The IPL derives its financial might from demographic, cultural and social factors. These include India’s 1.4 billion population, the country’s unbridled passion for cricket, and the rise in popularity of cricket’s shortest format, T20, in an era marked by greater competition for shortening attention spans globally. Why else is TikTok a thing? In the most recent bidding cycle, the IPL’s media rights were sold for $6 billion, making it the second most valuable sports league in the world on a per-game basis, trailing only America’s National Football League (NFL). In recent years the IPL has begun to expand abroad by buying teams in other T20 competitions in the Caribbean, the United Arab Emirates as well as South Africa. In the latter case, the IPL involvement is seen by some as a potential saviour of domestic cricket in South Africa, with the inaugural edition of the SA20 league held earlier this year as a joint venture between Cricket South Africa (CSA), local broadcaster SuperSport, and a subset of IPL ownership groups. For the first time in many years, local stadiums were packed for domestic cricket matches, and whether this will be sustainable once the novelty factor wears off remains to be seen.

Major League Cricket is the latest iteration of the IPL’s expansionist push, and arguably the most ambitious. In some ways, it echoes previous attempts at establishing football (or soccer) in the vast American sporting frontier, most notably the North American Soccer League (NASL) – a professional league which spanned the period 1968-1984. This was an attempt to entrench a sport with a large global following (football) in a country where it had a limited professional footprint (the United States) and was driven mainly by owners and administrators with roots outside the country in question using foreign star players to generate interest. The NASL’s popularity peaked in the late 1970s as a result of the high-profile New York Cosmos team and the participation of famous players such as Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer and Carlos Alberto. The 2006 documentary, Once In A Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos, offers a colourful account of this period.

But while the NASL ultimately folded in 1984, football eventually gained a foothold in the United States with the establishment of Major League Soccer (MLS) in the wake of the country’s hosting of the 1994 FIFA World Cup. Today the league is entrenched as part of America’s sporting fabric, if not at the same level as the NFL, NBA or MLB. But the recent arrival of late-career Lionel Messi at Inter Miami was at least a reminder of the commercial appeal and popularity of football in the United States today. It also serves as a timely reminder that, whatever the status quo might be, if given enough time, no sporting culture is constant. This was the case for football in the US: could it also be the case for cricket?

I think this is unlikely. Yet I think that Major League Cricket does serve as a helpful lens through which to consider overall shifts in the cricket landscape more broadly. This brings me back to my original point regarding the South African test team. The fundamental change that we have witnessed in recent years – and the underlying reason for my apathy towards the recent test tour to Australia – is the fact that T20 cricket has essentially morphed into a separate sport. It has evolved into a hyper-specialised endeavour and is exerting an irreversible gravitational pull due to its financial strength – primarily driven by the IPL. I was particularly struck by how many of South Africa’s top T20 players (who have IPL contracts) seamlessly appeared in Major League Cricket when they had just recently finished another seemingly expanding IPL season. Global T20 tournaments are increasingly squeezing the international cricket calendar, and national boards have so far been powerless against the might of the IPL. This is unlikely to change given the importance of India to global cricket economics, with a number of smaller nations relying on incoming Indian tours to generate crucial revenue through television rights. Any souring of cricket relations with India could lead to an existential crisis.

The South African case is also instructive more broadly. I would argue that in recent years there has been a greater separation between T20 specialists and test players, particularly on the batting front. What is most notable regarding South Africa’s most recent test batting lineup is that very few of these players have any significant T20 pedigree at the highest (IPL) level. Instead, the top order has tended to be populated by players with solid domestic long-form records but lacking the creative and attacking stroke play needed in T20. We have also seen attacking players like wicketkeeper-batsman Quinton de Kock retire from test cricket before the age of 30 in order to preserve their short-form careers. This is a trend that will undoubtedly continue.

More importantly, we are also witnessing the effects of T20 on player development. One of the most talked about prospects in South African cricket is Dewald Brevis, a young batsman who modelled his game on that of South Africa’s greatest short-form player, AB de Villiers (which has led to Brevis getting the nickname of ‘Baby AB’). De Villiers was one of the most popular players in the IPL during his career and it is no surprise that Brevis earned himself an IPL contract before having played a single red ball (long form) cricket match, the traditional proving ground for future test cricketers. Given the earnings potential on offer within global T20 tournaments and the amount of coverage afforded to the shorter format, I would venture to guess that the vast majority of teenage South African cricketers are setting their sights on reaching the IPL one day as opposed to playing in front of dwindling test match crowds.

It follows, then, that in order to reach that dream, one also needs to specialise in the skills needed to be successful in T20. Any time spent learning traditional red ball skills such as ‘how to leave outside off-stump’ with the bat or ‘maintaining a solid line and length in the corridor’ with the ball naturally incurs an opportunity cost. After all, what does it matter where your off stump is when trying to scoop the ball over fine leg for six? Why field in the sweltering sun in front of two umpires and a dog during a four-day match when you could be spending that time honing your power hitting back over the bowler’s head?

Thus my realisation on South Africa’s most recent test tour to Australia: the concept of ‘test’ cricket – i.e., the idea that the long format is the ultimate test of one’s skill – is becoming increasingly less apt. And it is the inevitable consequence of a wide array of market forces tied to the rise of T20. Yes, test cricket might still be sustained to some degree by the Big Three (in cricket economic terms) of India, England and Australia, but no amount of ‘Bazzball’ (England’s new attacking approach in the long format) is going to revive test cricket in the West Indies, Sri Lanka or even South Africa going forward. Remember when Ireland and Afghanistan finally earned ‘test’ status in 2017? That might as well have been 1917. Afghanistan, in particular, has produced some of the top T20 players in the world in recent years, with spin bowler Rashid Khan being the most prominent name. Yet the team has played only seven test matches in six years.

The market has spoken and will continue to speak. Whether Major League Cricket will be successful or not is ultimately irrelevant. Either way, we are still left with the following fundamental question regarding test cricket: If future generations do not want to be good at it or are not incentivised to be good at it, what is the point in playing it?

This is not meant to be a value judgement regarding the overall direction of world cricket. Whether these effects are corrosive or restorative depends on personal preference. Some might see this as a reflection on the workings of Father Time, the inevitable change that reflect any historical process. But I wonder what we lose when we forget that the ultimate lesson of cricket – so valuable for life in general – is that patience is a virtue.

‘Cricket in America’ was first published on Our Long Walk. Support more such writing by signing up for a paid subscription. The image was created with Midjourney v5.2.