Next month’s T20 World Cup will help build cricket’s profile and popularity in the United States ahead of its appearance at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, the sport’s world body said.
The 20th anniversary event will be co-hosted by the West Indies and the United States in June, with New York, Florida and Dallas as venues.
The International Cricket Council said it was confident the tournament would help the sport make a mark in a land where baseball rules.
“The fact that a World Cup has made the US the biggest sports market in the world has generated a lot of interest,” Chris Tetley, head of events at the ICC, told reporters at a media roundtable on Tuesday.
“This is a key stepping stone towards promoting the game to 2028 and beyond, in terms of providing world-class cricket to the huge existing fan base the sport already has in the US,” he added.
“We’re trying to give them something they’ve never had on their doorstep before and maybe pique the interest of the American sporting community by telling them that cricket is actually an older sport in the US than baseball.”
T20 Cricket will be one of five new sports at the Los Angeles Olympics.
Cricket’s only previous appearance at the Olympics was in 1900 in Paris, where a Great Britain team defeated France.
Eisenhower Park in Nassau County, near New York, saw the construction of a temporary 34,000-seat stadium and cricket field.
It will host the much-awaited India-Pakistan clash on June 9 among the eight games scheduled for the World Cup.
“We’re really happy with the pitch,” said stadium manager Damian Hough.
“Everything we did exceeded expectations. I can’t predict the results, that’s for the batsmen.
“We hope to have a typical T20 pitch where there is good bounce, good pace and value to the shots. Obviously you want the batsmen to bowl all over the ground.”
Hough and his team submitted presentation proposals more than a decade ago at Adelaide Oval, where he is chief curator.
But creating the stadium in Nassau County faced different challenges, including growing the field in Florida’s subtropics before transporting it 2,000 miles north through multiple climate zones.
Tetley said the stadium would be dismantled after the T20 extravaganza, but the “world-class facilities” would leave a lasting legacy for cricket in the United States.
fk/gle/dh
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to the text.
