Don’t piss off Ali Khan. The Clarion Eagles learned that the hard way.
After arguments over the controversy of the week in cricket - staying in your goddamn crease - flared up on Thursday and led to the Eagles arguing with an umpire, Ali Khan took great joy in his role in the first three wickets of the Space City Cowboys’ rout of the Eagles in the Houston Open final two days later, celebrating a catch to get Mukhtar Ahmed racing in from fine leg almost as much as the thick edge that got Prannav Chettipalayam. Then he got Eagles’ captain Akarshit Gomel to chop on and did… whatever the hell this is:
5, 6, 7, 8 and jazz hands! Yeah!
His exuberance gave a surprising amount of juice that needed something to offset a spectacular blowout. The Eagles scored just 108 runs in the next 14 overs and got bowled out well short of the total the Cowboys set for them, marking the first time in years, if not decades, that a team of Cowboys had intimidated a team of Eagles in Texas or anywhere else. Ali Khan was a big part of that, but so was Ali Sheikh, and Karthik Gattepalli rolled up the back end with a 5-24 spell to wrap up a 55 run win for the Cowboys, possibly the tournament’s first unbeaten champion since the current iteration of the event launched in 2016.
On the outskirts of Houston, about half a mile from Prairie View A&M's Blackshear Field - which was visible in drone shots hovering over Pitch #5 during the final on Saturday - the Prairie View Cricket Complex rumbled to life last week as the national domestic season began with games aplenty on two pitches at PVCC. Cricket, a summer sport if there ever was one, starts its national domestic season with the Houston Open in April, six months of off-and-on franchise and international games that wrap up in Rydal, Georgia, in October, and Major League Cricket situated at the heart of it in June and July. While there were some high-profile absences - Andries Gous, Hassan Khan, and Shayan Jahangir are in Pakistan, and Saurabh Netravalkar didn’t make himself available - virtually all of the USA's top 150 players rolled up to Prairie View last week for their first opportunity to put a marker down.
That’s the prevailing theme for a lot of domestic players here: opportunity. Most will get modest amounts of money - pay for the week ranged from $500 to $1500 plus food and lodging - but this is a proving ground to earn considerably more exposure and money in Major League Cricket down the road, which can then be parlayed into additional franchise opportunities around the world.
Naturally, the first day of the domestic season was a complete washout: rain overnight left the outfields at PVCC unplayable. It feels like a microcosm of American cricket right now: a lot of hype that ends in a big shrug.
It doesn’t have much to do with the players themselves; the talent pool is hardly on the level of a Full Member, but there are enough players that teams can field domestic XIs worth watching. The problems of the sport all exist in its economics, with the people and groups fronting money for franchises in a week-long tournament like the Houston Open facing a 0% chance of recovering their full investment. Payrolls are in the $15,000-20,000 range for full squads plus meals and lodging for the week and the franchise fee on the front end, leaving franchisees in a position where they have to be ready with big checks and lots of enthusiasm for writing off a loss on their taxes next year.
It’s also an inaccessible environment for new people despite being free on multiple YouTube channels. Crowds are nonexistent and may have actually been larger at the adjacent fields hosting area club matches, so there was little in the way of atmosphere. The production of the event had plenty of jagged edges, too. A major sponsor, Tarek Real Estate (Hasan Tarek owns the Atlanta Fire), ran a brief spot multiple times that listed it as a proud sponsor of Atlanta Open… the one in October. Commentary sounded like the crew was in a shipping container because they were literally in a shipping container refurbished into a portable structure. Starting someone on cricket with the Houston Open is like starting someone out on indie music with Animal Collective: it’s good if you know what you’re looking at, but it’s just as likely to confuse and scare away other people as it is to get them hooked.
And what is good here? The players. Tournaments like this are about the guys inside the rope, including players we rarely get to see in Major League Cricket or anywhere else. Players like Shuja Naqvi, the Cowboys’ 33-year-old skipper, who has been playing in the United States for about as long as Ritvik Appidi has been alive. He’s one of a handful of players still on the domestic circuit who played in a USACA tournament! He took 4/15 (with the benefit of some sensational catching) in the semifinal against Atlanta and seemed to have the players under his charge unified and motivated throughout the competition. The Los Angeles Knight Riders would be smiling ear to ear after this tournament if they even knew it was happening, as Ali Khan, Matthew Tromp, Gattepalli (all Cowboys), Unmukt Chand (Baltimore Royals) and Saif Badar (Clarion Eagles) all put in solid performances in a variety of roles and contexts. Tromp’s massive 88(30) in the semifinals was especially impressive, and Gattepalli made a couple of really difficult catches in the field during the week alongside his 5’fer in the final. TSK’s Smit Patel rolled up with a chip on his shoulder and showed he’s still among the country’s best batsmen with three half centuries in five games.
Others were less impressive. Several established national team players looked like they were just going through the motions. MINY draft pick Faisal Khan Ahmadzai looked deeply unpolished and rolled around on the pitch on his follow through more than once. Abhishek Paradkar, one of the standouts of last year’s MiLC campaign, hardly bowled at all, was expensive when he did, and got taken out on the boundary by teammate Hizbullah Durrani as deep third and backward point collided going for the same ball in the third game. Such is the nature of a compressed tournament like this.
And then there were the breakouts. Chettipalayam, 20, showed flashes of things to come with considerable top order power - something lacking in the US camp outside of Gous. He was more of a mixed bag in the gloves, but had three of the tournament’s four stumpings. Ali Sheikh looked the part of a true allrounder, capable with both bat and ball, although Seattle picking up Tanveer Sangha likely leaves him as the third spinner in an attack that will only feature two this summer. Aarin Nadkarni was tied for the third most wickets in the competition despite his team being done after the group stage. He was hardly a fire-breathing dragon in its final form, but he induced some bad swings and took nine wickets at a 7.54 economy in 13 overs, making him one of the tournament’s most efficient bowlers for his squad, Future Caps, a team stocked with players with little or no experience at the senior international level who will form the backbone of future national teams. They got a lot of experience against older players last week, and it keeps them playing high-level cricket, which is immensely valuable for their development.
In fact, I think the Future Caps project might be my favorite part of the weekend. It’s reminiscent of the efforts Slovakia undertook to improve the fortunes of its junior ice hockey teams by launching HK Orange 20, a prospects-focused team designed to assemble a group that would form the backbone of future Slovak national teams. It was a modest success; it didn’t win a lot of games, but the playing experience their younger players got as a unit netted Slovakia fourth in the 2009 World Junior Championships and bronze in 2015 while offering the first major opportunities against older competition for players like Martin Marincin and Marek Hrivik, both of whom played big roles in Slovakia’s Olympic bronze in 2022. It lasted about 15 years before being shuttered, but it had served its purpose, and it’s a purpose Future Caps will hope to serve in its own way by ensuring young players continue to face high-level competition throughout the summer. It’s a brilliant idea that probably could be done more sustainably, but I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth. I hope it sticks around and we see it in Atlanta after all these players get their biggest workload of the year at the national level in Minor League Cricket.
Hope. That’s a good word. There’s quite a few reasons to be hopeful in American cricket right now. Young citizen players breaking through with good individual and tournament-long performances is a great sign for the domestic game’s health at the highest level. Many of these young players still spent some amount of time in another country learning some part of their game, but they are a sign of real progress in the game’s growth here. American cricket is busy with activity, from baseball-adjacent media exposure to stories of individuals trying to convert to the game from other sports and make it to the next level. They are scattered, and the game is still very niche, but there are reasons to believe it’s moving forward.
There are also ample reasons to be skeptical. The growth the game has experienced isn’t really being sustained by anything other than the will of individuals who want it to happen. So much critical infrastructure is missing, from adequate playing spaces to coaches and umpires and the means to train them. While a handful of our best players can earn professional opportunities overseas, the bulk of our top-end talent pool is spinning its wheels in club cricket in a handful of major cities, with no sustained, full-season professional opportunities between franchise gigs like what exists in Full Member countries. The first chance we get to see all these guys in a given year is a tournament with zero Stateside buzz where players make, at most, $375 per game. The board is bankrupt and has less influence in the American game than corporations do, and it’s scary to think that, given the history of cricket governance in the United States, we might be better off that way. We might not have cricket in a way that comports to convention, but at least there will be something… but for how long? It depends entirely on how convenient it is for people to lose five figures (or six in MLC) on cricket.
It feels like this could be the year the game explodes, with a hodgepodge of different people and places picking up the game and moving it toward a critical mass of cultural awareness that sparks something when MLC brings Ashwin to Oakland. It also feels like it could be the year the game collapses all together under a murky financial picture and a lack of unified, visible leadership at a crucial juncture. I know a growing number of people locally and nationally who range from enthusiastic about cricket to dead serious about it, but is the domestic game serious about itself?
That particular riddle was never going to be solved in Prairie View, but it loomed over proceedings all the same. Everything good and bad about domestic cricket was on display in the space of a week. The games had a surprising amount of juice, especially late in the week, but the tournament isn’t really built to capitalize on that in any meaningful way. The teams will scatter and players will shuffle to different rosters for a few weeks in August, then some of them will shuffle to different rosters in October. The American domestic system meets excitement the same way it meets disappointment: with a shrug, because it will all be gone in a week.