In the Land of Football, a Cricket Oasis Rises Outside Houston
Drive northwest out of Houston, and as cow pastures wrestle back the flat expanse from the city’s tentacled sprawl, there arise along the road, suddenly, improbably many, many cricket fields.
Head south to find a small cricket stadium nestled in the suburbs, or west to find field sprouting in county parks.
The game of cricket – a bat-ball-and-wicked contest of patience and athleticism that was born in Britain and is barely understood by most Americans – has surprisingly taken hold in the land of Friday night football. A surging population of South Asian immigrants around Houston and Dallas imported their favorite sport to their adopted home, where it has grown amid a Lone Star culture of competition in all things, especially sports.
Cricket’s swift rise in Houston has attracted international attention and helped make Texas the launching pad for the sport’s first American professional league, Major League Cricket, whose inaugural season began on Thursday outside Dallas.
“One of the unknown things about Houston is the diversity of the population from many cricket-playing countries,” said Tim Cork, a deputy consul general at the British consulate in Houston. “There are Indians, Pakistanis. there’s obviously a huge number of Brits here, Australian accents wherever you go.”
The number of people of Indian heritage in Texas has doubled over the last decade to a half a million, according to estimates from the Census Bureau’s annual survey, including 73,000 in Harris County, which includes Houston, and 64,000 in suburban Fort Bend County.
“When I came to this country, the only sport I knew was cricket,” said KP George, the county judge in Fort Bend, who immigrated to the US from India in 1993. When he was elected in 2018, none of the county parks had a cricket field, he said. Now there are seven, and each is reserved for play months in advance.
“There’s a huge demand,” he said. “we’re working on a couple more fields.”
The pace of the sport’s development in Houston has surprised even those who have been working to make it happen.
Houston played played host to a player draft for the new professional league in March at the Johnson Space Center, one of the biggest tourist sites in the city. In the fields to the northwest of Houston, the league’s newly minted teams came together this month for training camps.
“We always thought we would be building it slowly,” said Mangesh Chaudhari, 38, an owner of the Prairie View Cricket Complex who, starting in 2018, oversaw the task of flattening a swath of farmland about 50 miles northwest of the city into six Oval cricket fields. “Suddenly cricket picked up.”
The location, among a major highway in Prairie View, Texas, offered both the right kind of clay soil for the grass pitch where cricketers bowl and bat, and free advertising to passing cars on U. S. Route 290.
The project, conceived and funded by a Houston businessman, Tanweer Ahmed, was a Field-of-Dreams gamble that if they built it, people would come. It worked better and faster than they had anticipated, Mr. Chaudhari said, adding that the complex was still a work in progress. For example, there are still no lights or permanent restrooms.
The arrival of cricket has given hope to some leaders in Prairie View, home to the historically Black state university, Prairie View A&M, that the tournaments will become a revenue stream for the cash-strapped town, even though it has few cricket aficionados or South Asian residents.
“Our stance is to help them out, help them grown,” said Kendrick Jones, a county commissioner and graduate of the university. “It’s a tourist attraction.”
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