America Caught in the Middle as Global Cricket Unravels

Jessy Singh lands hard on his bowling shoulder and has to be helped off the field. Shadley van Schalkwyk’s hands inexplicably turn to concrete as the ball flies toward him. Narayan Jagadeesan hits what is, unofficially, his first T20 century at 31 years old against the United States. All on a backdrop of a global cricket’s explosive growth morphing into a Kashmir willow ouroboros over nationalist interference in the governing affairs of South Asia’s cricket boards.

The vibes of the 2026 Men’s T20 World Cup couldn’t get much worse, even after a valiant chase led by Saiteja Mukkamalla, Milind Kumar (which was nice to see), and Shubham Ranjane to give the guys a chance at New Zealand in the final warm-up match. Bowling in the second and third phases of New Zealand’s innings was respectable - the death overs were actually pretty good - and held the Kiwis to 208 on a pitch that had produced 230 two days prior. It could have been even lower had catches been taken by Monank Patel in the covers and by van Schalkwyk on the rope. The USA chase started with a golden duck for Andries Gous, and Shayan Jahangir didn’t hang around long either, but Mukkamalla continued to show his chops as a T20 opener and stabilized things with Monank. Ranjane replicated his fine work with Texas from last summer when he led the final charge to set a target of 12 off the last over of the chase, but he picked out a fielder at long off going for the rope on the second ball of a sizzling final over from Matt Henry. Mohammad Mohsin stepped in and tried to do too much by himself: he got out quickly trying to lift a ball for six over third man.

American cricket has been stacking wins the last few weeks, starting with Michael E. Romero effectively removing USA Cricket’s toxic board of directors and allowing the organization to rebuild from the ashes of what Venu Pisike and company burned nearly to the ground. Ritvik Appidi gave us a fun moment with his highlight reel wicket against wunderkind Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, who just knocked 175 in the U19 World Cup Final against England. The women’s national team, despite some frustrating moments in Nepal, made undeniable progress and came up just short of qualifying for the Women’s T20 World Cup later this year. The Seattle Orcas are getting behind women’s cricket domestically and pushing hard. Even Willow, long criticized for keeping cricket in a silo as a spectator sport (among other things), is making strong positive overtures to a larger audience by making the USA’s World Cup matches free on YouTube and teaming up with Jomboy Media to provide an alternate broadcast that offers a terrific entry point into the sport.

It may be difficult for the men’s national team, a source of real pride and success when it has played over the last 18 months, to maintain that momentum when they haven’t played a T20I at full strength since the tour of Oman ended some 350 days ago, opting to send a much younger squad to the North American Cup last spring. Jessy’s injury could end up working out if it opens the door for Rushil Ugarkar to join the national team after he was the hard-luck final cut from the 15-man squad. The in-form youngster could give the USA an edge against Namibia and the Netherlands, and he may be uniquely prepared for his age to handle that pressure. Their chances against Pakistan could depend on the playing surface they get in Colombo, normally thought of as a spinner’s paradise but with room for a surprise. They at least get India out of the way early and can focus on their tournament campaign while India goes off on its cakewalk to averaging 266 with the bat or something. Even Gautam Gambhir would be hard-pressed to screw up India’s T20 powerhouse now that it’s fully armed and operational with the new vanguard taking up the baton from Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma.

The really sour part of all this momentum is that, after 2+ years of frustration under the yoke of a toxic board wondering when it was going to be our turn to join the explosive growth of the sport, we now seem to have that momentum as the rest of the game tries to tear itself apart.

The BCCI, which is not beating the allegations of being a captured institution of its government, lit this candle when they gave right-wing agitators exactly what they wanted by making Mustafizur Rahman shoulder responsibility for his government’s failure to protect Bangladesh’s Hindu minority from mob violence. That candle has ignited a wildfire that threatens to engulf all of international cricket as Pakistan’s government announced plans to bar its national team from playing India in Colombo on February 15.

Jay Shah has been in charge of the ICC for a little over a year, and it’s hard to list many meaningful successes. Perhaps if India and Pakistan hadn’t had their four-day aerial war in the middle of the franchise season and Gen Z Bangladeshis hadn’t toppled an India-friendly authoritarian government, Shah would be a perfectly adequate Chairman overseeing gradual increases in revenues for everyone before eventually pushing India’s leverage in the sport too far and getting ousted. Instead, he has overseen a handful of brushfire crises across the sport and tripped over all of them. His Board slow-played USA Cricket’s suspension when it was obvious what needed to be done, enabling the Venu Crew to create manifold new headaches for everyone invested in the sport here. It’s attempting to steamroll players over use of their likenesses in video games. It shrugged at the failures of Oman and Papua New Guinea to pay their players the money owed from the 2024 T20 World Cup, and shrugged again when Oman retaliated directly against its players for complaining. France might not even have a governing body anymore.

Now he is faced with his first truly serious and urgent crisis, one that hits home amongst the Full Member ranks. Rather than build consensus and keep everyone in the boat, Shah seems content to let the BCCI turn that wildfire into a flamethrower and maybe even help them do it. For global cricket, having someone in a prime position of power with direct ties to an ethno-nationalist government that is hostile to other countries with major presence in the game is a problem, but it appears to be a feature for the BCCI that most countries still will look the other way on as long as the money keeps coming in. The 109th Rule of Acquisition - dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack - seems universal in the sport and will only serve to keep it fractured and small and should give pause to the IOC as it considers permanently adding it to the Olympics program beyond 2028. India has a 2036 Summer Games bid to think about, too. This will come up during the vetting process.

Nobody’s thinking about that, though. Consequences are for betas. They’re only worried about the next dunk that sensationalist media outlets will gleefully print and reprint to amplify their message. Even if cooler heads ultimately prevail, the damage is done, and too many people have shown their ideological hands for this not to have lasting ramifications for international cricket. It’s fair game to turn your cricketers into politicians now, even when they’re clearly not suited for that task and their only consent to it was picking up a bat on the “wrong” side of a disputed border. It will continue so long as the people in charge are fine with it.

Watching this sport unravel as my own country resists going down the same belligerent ultra-nationalist rabbit hole is upsetting, but that feeling gets an extra kick because it’s totally antithetical to the foundational elements of American cricket.

Yes, the Indian diaspora is larger and wealthier than other cricket-playing diasporas here, but 5.1 million people spread across the width of a continent is still not enough to sustain a sport at an international level in the US. The sport cannot afford to put up walls, isolate, ostracize or diminish any group of people if it wants to survive and thrive here as anything more than jai alai 2.0. It is a sport that was snuffed out in the US a century ago by imperial snobbery, revived by immigrants from within that empire coming here and adding their beloved sport to our country’s culture. If we treated immigrants from these countries the way their governments and cricket boards are treating each other, we’d be lucky to find 15 people who though cricket wasn’t an insect or, worse, a pay-as-you-go cell service.

I am not naive enough to think the United States or USA Cricket has anywhere near enough clout to chart a new course for the game in any actionable way. We don’t have the cash and won’t get the cash to invite Bangladesh for a white ball tour in September, for example (because you know India isn’t going on that tour of Bangladesh). What I do know, though, is that when our XI steps out on the field tomorrow, there will be Indians and Pakistanis in it. They will work together for a greater goal and they will embody the spirit of this game in a way that the spite-filled hacks at the BCCI and PCB have long since lost sight of. Whether or not the US wins tomorrow morning - and I seriously doubt it will - I’m excited to watch the guys play because that unity across so many different would-be barriers is something that they don’t allow to define them. It underscores what makes this game great and where it can take us, and it makes me proud to cheer them on.

See y’all in the morning.