There are three tiers of teams in Major League Cricket: the teams that are serious about building the sport here and are building something, the teams that haven’t figured it out but are trying, and the teams that use American cricket purely as a status symbol for the entertainment of parties elsewhere. There is an impulse to put two teams in each: New York and Los Angeles at the bottom, Texas and Washington in the middle (though there is a wide gap between the two), and San Francisco and Seattle serving as very different, yet complementary standard bearers for the league.

The Unicorns and Orcas have gone at it two different ways. San Francisco is not neglecting its outreach, but priority number one is playing winning cricket and attracting an audience that can appreciate a high standard of play. A partnership with Cricket Victoria has yielded considerable fruit to date and enabled them to buy low on players who might not be on other teams’ radars… like Cooper Connolly, who is now tearing it up with the Delhi Capitals and could play a big role in the top order in San Francisco this year. Their belief seems to be that winning is its own kind of branding, and that everything the team does should have a justification toward that end, including its robust and growing suite of team-specific sponsors. Signing R. Ashwin wasn’t just a move for ticket sales and sponsorship, though it will help both; the Unicorns found themselves hard up for spin options last year outside of Hassan Khan. Ashwin has a chance to help them win if he shows up in shape, which, if we judge him by his actions before a knee injury knocked him out of the Big Bash League last winter, he will. Point being, the vision is clear, the branding is clear, and the Unicorns have a clear plan for how to grow and sustain a brand that caters to the South Asian diasporas in the US as a primary growth vector rather than purely exporting cricket content to the subcontinent. Win enough, and the fans will roll in. Truly an “if you build it, they will come” approach.

Seattle has prioritized the opposite: off-field brand visibility defines the Orcas. They want to be seen everywhere and will go everywhere to be seen. They hosted a 5k. They adopted a metro station. They sent their domestic players to a children’s hospital as part of a sponsorship deal. These are things traditional American sports teams do, and the Orcas have been aggressive about getting their name out. The things they’re doing are a lot of small, easily actionable ideas to help boost their presence in their home market even without a stadium. They’re the only team with a dedicated media relations person with readily available contact info. They’re not just trying to grow within the niche, but also actively expand it and get eyeballs on the squad… but when the curtain goes up, the results still have to be there to back it up. That doesn’t necessarily mean trophies, but it does mean wins.

Despite a mid-season recovery in 2025 led by Shimron Hetmyer’s heroics with the bat, the last two seasons for the Orcas have ranged from forgettable to dreadful. The 2023 runners-up are looking for a way back to ensure the momentum their branding efforts create doesn’t stall. The Orcas showed last year that their patience had run out; it’s nigh-unheard of for a cricket franchise to sack both head coach and captain mid-season, but they moved on from Matthew Mott and Heinrich Klaasen in leadership roles at the halfway mark of 2025 and acknowledged there was no need to keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Now they’re carrying that appetite for change forward to the 2026 roster under new head coach Adam Voges, who knows a thing or two about playing winning T20 cricket.

Seven of the Orcas’ nine overseas players have been announced, and Hetmyer is the only confirmed returner from 2025 so far, which is easily the most turnover in MLC heading into 2026. Seattle sorely needed bats to shore up the top order, and they made signings that carry less name recognition but might have plenty of punch. They signed Matthew Breetzke - a recurring cast member for South Africa currently warming the bench with Lucknow - and 24-year-old Kiwi Tim Robinson (happy birthday!). Lungi Ngidi has been brought in to lead the pace attack hoping for more than his 2024 cameo (provided he is okay after a scary injury playing for Delhi), and Tim Seifert is in to keep wicket with the option for a platoon with Shayan Jahangir. Marcus Stoinis was on the outs with Texas after three underwhelming seasons, so the Orcas scooped him up hoping he’ll arrive with a chip on his considerable shoulders, possibly along with the captaincy. They’ve even bolstered spin with Tanveer Sangha, who had some bright moments with the Knight Riders in the early part of last season. Overall, it feels like a much more complete and prepared team than their offerings of the recent past.

Breetzke and Robinson are the ones that have my attention, though, because these are players a team can brand around. Given their roles in their current national team setups, these are players who could potentially be available for multiple consecutive years to return to Seattle if they’re successful. Just as importantly, though, they aren’t really viewed as franchise tourists. Breetzke is obviously a fixture in his home competition and has had a great couple of years in the Blast for Northamptonshire, but he’s not on the IPL/CPL/ILT20 loop and coming in with the associated cache - or the baggage, depending on his form in those other leagues. These are players who have a chance to establish time in Seattle as major career highlights. They can be “our guys,” something MLC as a whole has struggled to nail down as franchises try to build sustained roster cores in a system that doesn’t value or reward that kind of long-term thinking.

The chances of these pickups working out are better than 50/50. Robinson is especially exciting as someone who has two T20 centuries to his name at a young age and who appears to be a rising star in the shortest format with just a handful of games outside New Zealand on his resume. While Jahangir put forward a valiant effort at the top of the order for the Orcas last year, he often found himself without much help, including having a front row seat to Steven Taylor’s agonizing 10-ball duck against San Francisco at Lauderhill. Kyle Mayers was quite literally hit or miss, and the David Warner signing was a bust. Now they’re pivoting to much younger players either in or entering their primes in those roles who can add considerable punch in front of Hetmyer with the hope that when #189 walks out of the dugout, he’s being asked to win games rather than save them. That will go a long way toward shoring up the league’s worst net run rate from 2025, and that could mean the difference between making the playoffs - where anything can happen - and another crash-out.

The USA women are getting meaningful cricket this spring with an assist from the ICC, competing in the ICC Challenge Trophy in Rwanda this month and into early May as the back end of a tour of Africa that got off to an inauspicious start in Uganda. Those games didn’t have T20I status, though, and they’ve capitalized on the games that do: they’re top of the table outright with two games left and a two point lead over Rwanda. The USA women smashed Vanuatu yesterday morning by 72 runs as Chetna Pagydyala and Isani Vaghela notched their second half-century of the tournament each with a 110-run stand for the second wicket. Pagydyala is the tournament’s leading run scorer.

The bowling has been effective, as well. Maahi Madhavan took a wicket late and now has at least one in eight straight games. It’s a team that has gained confidence as the tournament has gone along after a rocky start to their African tour in Uganda, and even without Tara Norris and Ella Claridge in the touring squad, they are posting some convincing results. If they continue to perform well, they could get into the top 20 in the women’s T20I rankings at the end of the tournament. With Nepal’s win over Rwanda earlier today, the USA has one hand on the trophy and can clinch it outright with a win over Italy in Kigali on Thursday. Success would mark the first non-regional hardware in the history of American women’s cricket.

What has become abundantly clear is that, despite the extreme youth of its roster, the US is the best team at this event, even without their top fast bowler Norris or an impact bat in Claridge. Five players on the team that beat Vanuatu are eligible for the U19 World Cup and will likely form the backbone of the team that goes to Canada in August for the first-ever Americas qualifier for that event. Maahi Madhavan has taken a wicket in eight straight games, while Pagydyala turns 18 in just a few days, and Gargi Bhogle, Taranum Chopra, and Sainavi Kambalapalli are also accounted for in August.

The youth of this team is due to a number of factors - women’s cricket is largely amateur in the US and what few international players preceded them have almost all retired - but this group has gathered a ton of experience and still has room to get better. Their progress comes at a time when the willingness to support the growth of the women’s game is already at an all-time high and seems ready to go higher. If the investment matches the rhetoric, these games aren’t just going to pay off in six months - they’re going to pay off for 15 years.

I’ll have a standalone story on the women’s team hopefully sometime next week. Fingers crossed for two more wins - and one more international series sometime this summer.

I’m often critical of the state of American cricket, a product of poor administration with zero connection to the grassroots. But associate cricket in general is in shambles, from Cricket France being legally barred from fielding the French national teams by name to the well-documented catastrophe that is Cricket Canada. One would think a country like Nepal, where cricketers are genuine celebrities and crowds for major games are robust, would be immune to the kind of governance headaches plaguing other countries right now.

One would be wrong. Remember what Biggie taught us: mo money, mo problems.

The Cricket Association of Nepal has not always made the most of the support the game enjoys. Their national teams have struggled; the women have lost 13 of their last 19 games dating back to last year, and the men are in seventh in the Cricket World Cup League 2 standings after starting out in a huge hole. They have had agonizingly close losses to South Africa and England in consecutive T20 World Cups, but they also lost to Italy in a baffling 10-wicket defeat earlier this year. They snapped a four-game losing streak in ODIs over the weekend with a 37-run win over a long-tailed UAE that was sunk the moment the seventh wicket fell. All the while, the ground beneath their feet was under threat.

On Sunday, Tribhuvan University, home of the gorgeous Tribhuvan University International Cricket Ground in Kirtipur, issued a notice to CAN to vacate the premises by the end of May. CAN’s lease on the property technically expired 13 days ago and has yet to be renewed. TU has been very clear that the terms of the previous lease are not acceptable for them going forward and have insisted on a new deal that includes changes ranging from greater transparency over facility revenues to ticket allocations for TU students and staff. That position got some extra leverage from Nepal’s new government elected in March, which has launched an effort to reclaim state-held lands from third parties who might either be occupying them illegally or on lopsided terms. They are not messing around on that front, and that provided the impetus for TU to put its foot down. CAN now has to get serious about a new lease or lose the facility.

The good news is, the government’s National Sports Council is involved, and there is optimism for a new deal. A 35 day notice period moves the deadline for an agreement past all the currently scheduled international matches at the stadium, including the USA’s tri-series with Nepal and Scotland that wraps on May 21. That means there is plenty of time to work out a new lease without any disruption of CAN’s calendar, but future international series or, say, the 2026 NPL, could be thrown into doubt if talks drag on. This is likely just a case of bad timing creating bad optics for a passionate cricket country that can’t seem to catch a break. It should be straightforward to get a new lease done, but never underestimate the ability of cricket boards to bungle the basics. Frankly, a cricket board squatting in a stadium because it failed or refused to hash out a new lease would be pretty middle of the pack as cricket governance disasters go. At least CAN is solvent.