"Karima Gore has been inspirational!" declared Ian Bishop, cricket's most eminently listenable commentator, on Sunday afternoon after Gore smacked a ball for four through midwicket against the St. Kitts and Nevis Patriots.
Gore eclipsed the half-century mark for the third time in the 2025 CPL season last Sunday, and at the end of the Falcons' seven-wicket win over the Patriots, he was the league's leading run scorer to date. As I write this on Wednesday night after Colin Munro was dismissed for 9 off 10, Gore is STILL the league's leading run scorer this season.
The 27-year-old’s batting form in the Caribbean isn't that shocking given recent trends. He captained the Antigua & Barbuda Master Blasters on an unbeaten title run in the Leeward Islands 50-over tournament in St. Kitts last October. He played for the T20 side, as well, averaging 75 in three innings with a 164.84 strike rate for a crew that lost in the final under the captaincy of Rahkeem “The Dream” Cornwall.
What does make it surprising is that he made his name in international cricket as a bowler. He has bowled more than five times as many balls in T20Is (124) as he has faced with the bat (28), although his rate stats are pretty solid in limited sample size for a potential allrounder. He has never batted higher than eighth for the United States and had never batted higher than fifth for anyone in T20s - even the Master Blasters - before the Falcons decided to put him in the all-important three spot this summer, which has gotten about as good of a batting result as the Falcons are gonna get from anyone this season.
Gore has scored more runs in this CPL than his entire T20 career combined before the CPL season began. He only batted once for San Francisco in Major League Cricket: he came in at #7 in San Francisco's disastrous loss to LA in Lauderhill on July 6. His bowling figures were decent, although he was lit up for 22 runs in two overs in that same game against the Knight Riders to level out a great spell against Texas two nights earlier where he went 1-25 with 11 dots in four overs in a one-run win.
So did everyone just whiff on Karima Gore? The answer is a nuanced, but I lean toward “not really.” There is an old adage that is especially popular among investors: being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong.
Gore has been capped 24 times by the United States (16 ODIs, 8 T20Is), but they moved on from him after the 2022 T20 World Cup Regional qualifier in November 2021 (also the last time Ian Holland suited up in a T20I, I'm just saying). Instead of falling off the face of the Earth, he went to the Caribbean and worked his ass off to get better, and it is only recently that his efforts have started to bear fruit. He made his First Class debut with the Leeward Islands in the spring of 2023 and is just this year breaking through to the franchise scene. So USA Cricket wasn't anymore wrong to drop Gore than they were to select him in the first place. They saw the promise, but players don't always develop at the same speed, and Gore needed more time to break out and showcase his potential to a fuller extent - something he is just now doing.
Whether Gore returns to the USA setup or makes the switch to the West Indies (which he is eligible to do) or has a nice tranquil domestic career, this underscores a couple of things to me.
First, the US domestic structure still needs better organization and opportunity for players to play both professional and semi-pro cricket. Franchise cricket is a valuable piece of that, a commercially lucrative piece of it, but club cricket is still limited to isolated pockets around major metros where cash prizes are more of a perk. Gore was able to go to Antigua and make cricket into something resembling a livelihood, one that his two franchise stops have boosted considerably. That’s something he couldn’t have done in the Atlanta Cricket League or the Cricket League of New Jersey or the Northern California Cricket Association. While the domestic system can produce high-level talents - Saiteja Mukkamalla being probably the most visible example - it’s still chaotic. There is no national club championship, and the zonal teams don’t have strong enough grassroots under them to make them worth much. Better organization lets players slip in and out of the national team and have built-in places to compete at a high level between call-ups.
The second is that franchise cricket has real value. There is an inclination among more established countries to think of it as parasitic on the sport because it is new and thus disruptive, but consider that it’s the primary way most Americans who aren’t actively picking up a bat on their weekends will engage with the sport. It offers an opportunity for players to break out and earn their way back into the conversation around their international white ball sides, keeping careers alive and ensuring that individual boards and their quirky politics are not the be-all, end-all of determining who is an international-caliber cricketer.
Whatever the final leg of Gore’s CPL holds - and it likely won’t hold any playoff games given the Falcons’ form - his batting has opened a door for him that would not have been open without the league and the opportunity. He has more skills than a “former US international” label might give him credit for, and what’s most exciting is that his development might still not be complete even as he enters what are normally the prime years for a cricketer.
That, more than any one shot he has played this summer, is what’s truly inspirational.
Thanks for reading Stumps & Stripes! If you like something with a little more heat to it, check out my previous piece on the myriad ways the ICC has failed its associate members in governance, from accountability to accounts payable.
My posting schedule has frayed a little as I have gotten into the peak season of my Real Job (along with a new set of duties that includes writing), but content is in the works, including some thoughts on Canada and why Minor League Cricket matters so much. Stay tuned!