I can’t take credit for the joke because I didn’t write it, but it was likely one that flew through the mind of every American cricket observer and fan when Minor League Cricket announced earlier this week that its 2026 season will start August 7th:
Wow, is it August 5th already?
Chalk it up to any number of factors - brinkmanship with sanctioning by an unserious (and now former) USA Cricket Board of Directors, a misunderstanding of the needs of the American sports market, or simple indifference to public relations - but MiLC is notorious for leaving these sorts of announcements to the last possible moment. We didn’t even know if there would be a Minor League Cricket last year because the league dragged its feet on an announcement. Now there is clarity for the teams to book venues and put a schedule together well in advance. That’s a huge win for the teams and for anyone wanting to watch them play in person, and it comes from ACE taking a common issue with the way it operates and addressing it. It’s superficial, granted, and it is not necessarily the trickle at the front end of a flood, but it’s something simple and actionable that has been corrected and makes everyone’s lives a little easier. That’s encouraging, because right now, ACE is the only thing holding American cricket together.
USA Cricket is flat on the deck as it rolls through bankruptcy under the guidance of a trustee, with the absurd niche infighting of its Board of Directors having been cast aside by the courts in early January. That infighting was framed as being a major impediment to ACE through its political meddling and attempts to disrupt or undermine its operations. Those obstacles are gone now, but the sport's governance remains in limbo that everyone from the USOPC to the ICC is tiptoeing around. The upshot of all of that is that the most likely way for Americans to engage with high-level cricket for the next six months or so is through some kind of ACE property, be it a stadium, a team, or a league.
That's a lot of power and also a lot of responsibility. ACE will set the terms of how American cricket develops talent for the foreseeable future and set the bar for that talent’s earning potential domestically. Its decision making over the next few weeks and months will chart the course for Olympic readiness and can determine the future of the women's game (which is a whole separate piece) as the country lurches again toward its previously stated goal of Full Member status by 2030. It cannot be complacent in its stewardship-by-default of our cricket, and that starts with ensuring American talent has space to flourish in the professional arena… something in short supply at the moment.
I can best sum up MLC’s domestic bottleneck with something that actually happened: the final over of the 2025 MLC Grand Final. Kieron Pollard was probably Nicholas Pooran's first choice to bowl that over against Glenn Maxwell - commentators were speculating as much as Trent Boult bowled the 19th over - but Pollard got injured diving for a catch on the fourth ball of the 19th and was not even on the field at the end. Pooran turned anxiously to Rushil Ugarkar, who had admittedly struggled with extras in the death overs earlier in the season but was bowling much better than Pollard that night at Grand Prairie. Ugarkar came up clutch and flipped what looked like a Washington win into New York’s second championship in three seasons.
That's powerful symbolism. Pollard is familiar and comfortable, certainly so for Pooran for myriad reasons, and even though he’s not who he was even two years ago, the inclination is that someone like Pollard has to be the one to carry the day. But it was a young American who upstaged not just Pollard, but Maxwell, by showing that commitment to his development and playing time throughout the summer had prepared him to make a star turn in a big moment. Players who had made a name for themselves in the IPL over the last decade showed up in 2025 with a permanent decline in skillset (Pollard’s bowling, Maxwell batting against anything that isn’t dead straight) or were flat-out phoning it in. Maybe I'm crazy, but I don't think anyone is buying $30 tickets or $10 Willow subscriptions because they get to see Marcus Stoinis average 14 with the bat and 30 with the ball for Texas. Don't even get me started on Sunil Narine, I’ll be here all day.
Meanwhile, players like Mohammad Mohsin, the USA’s third-leading wicket taker at the T20 World Cup, are struggling to get consistent run. Players like Abhishek Paradkar and Yasir Mohammad are confined to the nets. Utkarsh Srivastava isn’t even on a roster (yet). The young players that are on MLC rosters are in a bad way: Seattle only picked Ayan Desai twice last season with very mixed results, while Ali Sheikh was a sub fielder and Rahul Jariwala spent all year on the bench. At least Agni Chopra got the chance to fail with New York before they parked him. These players are not as famous, and, sure, they probably have holes in their games, but they take the competition seriously and their play serves a purpose. That makes the product more compelling, especially for an American audience whose top demands are effort and passion. If fans are able to perceive themselves as caring more than the players do, there’s no coming back from that.
When Major League Cricket and the ILT20 were granted List A status by the ICC, they were grandfathered into a provision requiring T20 franchise leagues to field seven domestic players in a lineup with the understanding that they would eventually be required to get to that threshold. MLC required five domestic players at the time and still does. It wasn't a bad hedge given that the domestic talent pool had few proven players in their primes, and the initial high-performance cohort was largely recruited by ACE themselves from uncapped internationals. Now, entering year four of MLC, year seven of the ACE project and the second year under a new CEO, the talent pool is beginning to strain against those limitations. That is an unequivocally good thing, but it creates its own challenges. Raising the domestic cap to six or the eventually-mandatory seven offers some amount of hope to the players toiling away outside the limelight that their careers are going somewhere that leads to real money made playing cricket. The worst case scenario is that they don't work out and are replaced, but roster churn is a healthy and normal part of sports. Teams will not do that unless they are compelled by the league, so the league must compel them. It can do so gradually or all at once, but given the robust international calendar that will limit high-level import options this year, the iron is hot to make this change. It’s a straightforward, good-faith, cost-effective change (imports are way more expensive) that moves the league in a direction it needs to go anyway, especially adding more citizens to the mix to prepare for a tournament that will require it - the 2028 Olympics.
ACE could not account for the Olympics when it put the whole plan into motion of signing B-list internationals and Full Member domestic stalwarts to flesh out its rosters and oh hey, all these guys now meet ICC eligibility to play for the US men's national team, just in time for a home T20 World Cup. The landscape was different then, and ACE is the only organization with the cash and clout to bear the standard and lead cricket into its future as that landscape shifts. Most of the players who appeared in the 2026 T20 World Cup are not US citizens, and outside of Monank Patel (who has had a green card for many years, a requirement for naturalization), they are unlikely to get citizenship in time for the Olympics to ensure roster continuity. The USOPC will be very hard-nosed on that point because the IOC is very hard-nosed on it, and while ACE does not control the national team’s personnel directly, it holds significant sway over their ability to prepare for major tournaments, develop into meaningful contributors, and build reputations for themselves because its leagues are the principal source of high-performance playing time in the United States.
It is better to embrace this change than fight it or dismiss it. Staying the course means MiLC ends up with more weight in determining and preparing the Olympic squad than MLC does, and when those Olympians start playing again after the Olympics, wherever they play is where the audience will get a short-term bump. ACE, and specifically MLC, does not want to live in a world where the YouTube streams on canted PTZs are the way new people engage with top end of US cricket over The Big Show. It raises too many existential questions with bad answers, all of which can be avoided by simply changing two single-digit numbers on a spreadsheet.
There are additional things that can be done, like greater clarity on the pathways from MiLC to MLC for young players. MLC doesn’t really have a system in place to allocate young talent to its franchises commensurate with the number of them coming up through the ranks. Reworking the draft to make it more like the NHL’s draft-and-reserve system would go a long way on that front, affording young players a clear way up the ladder and also keeping the MLC franchises under discussion during and after MiLC, as Seattle’s #2 prospect opens the bowling for East Bay against San Ramon and I can write pieces like The Top 10 MLC Prospects After MiLC 2027 because we know who the serious prospects are on the front end without having to know someone in an organization. That’s a longer-term project that requires more planning to get right, and probably another piece unto itself; in the meantime, simply widening the existing playing opportunities is a sufficient next step to give the league and its player base the headroom to keep growing.
ACE knew this was coming. It’s a good problem to have, because it means the domestic talent pool is finally robust enough to start pushing against the restrictions put on it. More importantly, this is a problem they hoped they would have one day, and it has probably arrived sooner and with more urgency than they were anticipating.
I also have a good problem - in writing this newsletter, I hit on fodder for three more newsletters. A good problem to have, but like all good problems, it still must be solved.