With T-20 cricket moving into mainland USA and evoking a fair response from the spectators so far, it is time to delve into the age-old question yet again?why did cricket lose out to baseball in the US in the closing decades of the 19th century? This is especially relevant when we note that cricket in the US goes back to 1709 and had a fairly well-established constituency till the middle of the 19th century with regular tours being undertaken to the US and Canada from parts of the empire.
Why, on the one hand, did cricket flourish in lands like Pakistan and India? And why, on the other hand, is cricket not much played in the United States, with its heritage and ?special relationship? with Britain? For decades, historians have debated why cricket and baseball, both with century-old histories, became national passions in two of the world?s biggest erstwhile colonies, and were appropriated and subverted by indigenous peoples for purposes of confrontation against the Empire. In both cases, the common reference point remains the Empire. While in the Americas, the desire was to dissociate American sport from British sport, in countries like India where the Empire lasted far longer, the intention was to appropriate and subsequently indigenise British sports for purposes of resistance. In fact, the American reaction to Empire sport was simply the opposite of the Indian retort to imperial games. In India, the nationalist movement from the close of the 19th century made it imperative that cricket be taken up as a non-violent means to compete with the ruling British. In the United States, where independence was achieved a century and a half earlier than India, this need was totally irrelevant. Rather, what was important in the US was to sever all sporting connections with the empire to emphasise an independent American identity. It is this inverse invocation of nationalism that best provides the key to unwinding the old dichotomy, Why baseball, why cricket? in differing global contexts.
The earliest record of cricket in the Americas was found in the ?secret diary? of William Byrd II of Virginia and the date, believe it or not, is April 25, 1709. Subsequent references to cricket date back to Georgia in 1737 and an advertisement in a New York paper for players in 1739. The first recorded American cricket match was in New York in 1751 on the site of what is today the Fulton fish market in Manhattan.
Cricket, records indicate, remained popular in the Americas until the 1860s and the first recognised international match between Canada and USA was attended by over 10,000 spectators at Bloomingdale Park in New York in 1844. Tours to and from the US were common until the 1880s, and the best moment for US cricket came when a United States side defeated the West Indies in an international match in British Guyana in 1880. Though matches between Americans and British residents were played on the American West Coast right through the 1880s and 1890s, cricket, by the turn of the century, had given way to baseball. By the end of the Civil War, baseball?s ascendance to the top of the American sporting pantheon was inevitable, if not already complete. Though cricket would experience a revival in the 1870s, it would never again compete with baseball as either a participatory or a spectator sport in the United States. The most compelling question to emerge from this development is simply ?why??. What were the factors that allowed baseball to prevail over cricket, despite the latter?s longer history both inside and outside the US?
It was the 1850s that became the critical decade in this battle for sporting supremacy. As American nationalism emerged and strengthened, baseball, continually forged and moulded to suit the needs of Americans, began to assert a stronger hold on the American public, eventually pushing cricket forever into the margins of American sporting life. It was during this decade that calls for a national game were heard, and it was this decade that saw the term ?national pastime? first written. The need to create a national game grew out of the American desire to ?emancipate their games from foreign patterns?.
If sport is in fact a metaphor (and in some cases a metonym) for war, then cricket simply was not necessary in the United States, as it was in India. The US, having prevailed militarily already against the British (twice) had no need for ?war minus the shooting?. The early date of American independence, coupled with the arrival of American nationalism in the 1850s and beyond, meant that cricket was inevitably the game that had to lose in the battle with baseball.
The truth is that American sports fans still prefer sports that they can identify as ?American?; the internationalisation of professional basketball and baseball in recent years may actually be hurting their domestic popularity. Meanwhile, the least integrated of the major sports in the United States?the National Football League and NASCAR?have not seen concomitant declines in viewership. The need to assert Americanness in the sporting field still remains a vigorous part of the culture of spectatorship in the US. This need to separate predates the rise of the US to its own imperial status. It first began in the rejection of a decidedly British sport for one that was more ?American?. It is this challenge to carve out a constituency of American cricket fans that will determine if the newest experiment to take cricket to the Americas turns out to be a success.
?The writer is a cricket historian