Saturday was a fascinating exercise in chase-watching. After giving up more runs than they should have, the USA was chasing a 232 target in 45 overs that felt under par but also tricky for a team that has had more than its share of gremlins in run chases over the course of the current World Cup cycle. The loss of the in-form Smit Patel early made the chase into a methodical grind full of stress, pacing, occasional cursing, and then a sudden inability to do those things because I was attending a social function as my wife's plus-one. The USA spent a couple of hours hovering right at or just below the required run rate, never feeling too far behind but also not blasting ahead.
Until, of course, they did, thanks to someone I trust implicitly as an observer and someone I'm learning to trust quickly.
Saiteja Mukkamalla was part of yet another historic partnership, his 81*(84) making him the junior contributor in an unbeaten 187 run stand for the third wicket alongside veteran southpaw Shehan Jayasuriya to guide the USA to what proved a methodical eight wicket victory with 5.1 overs to spare. Mukkamalla is now part of three of the top six ODI partnerships for the United States with the vast majority of his career still ahead. Jayasuriya recorded his first ODI century largely with Mukkamalla on his wing. He was willing to anchor at the opposite end for Monank Patel early on but took the reins when Monank went down for 22. Jayasuriya stayed methodical and accelerated in the second half of the innings, using the wind to get extra carry on a couple of pull shots for six and playing some really nice drives along the ground, including one where he muscled a ball outside off stump past a lunging fielder at mid-off for four late on in a 10-run 35th over that began to tip things decisively toward the USA en route to a comfortable win.
The 34-year-old former Sri Lanka international has played just six ODIs for the United States but has made an immediate impact, scoring 251 runs in those six innings. He grabbed a half century in a 100 run stand for the second wicket against Nepal on May 16 before his departure triggered an embarrassing collapse of 73/8, and his century on Saturday marked his first in international cricket. This follows on from a good run with the bat for Panadura in Sri Lanka (where he actually served as captain over the winter) and a good Minor League Cricket campaign before that. It's rare to see someone bounce back quite this profoundly from being dropped by Seattle after an underwhelming 2024 campaign in MLC, but it's clear Jayasuriya had something in the tank. The Orcas even picked him back up for 2026.
His age also means this rebound may be short - just enough to get the USA through the current World Cup cycle - which presents another problem: where the hell are the lefties?
Left-handed batting is in short supply in the US top order and has been since Steven Taylor's batting fell apart. These are the average batting positions of left-handed batters in the current CWC League 2 cycle:
Steven Taylor 1.0
Jayasuriya 3.4
Abhishek Paradkar 7.0 (has batted once)
Harmeet Singh 7.35
Shadley van Schalkwyk 7.7
Yasir Mohammad 9.0 (has batted once)
Mohammad Mohsin 9.5
There is mixed-to-negative scholarship on whether left-right batting partnerships are all that effective, although they’ve become sufficiently popular in T20 cricket as to kickstart a feedback loop back into tests and ODIs. But if the goal is to handcuff the opposing captain tactically, especially in spin-friendly conditions, Jayasuriya’s role as a top order lefty fills a crucial, if somewhat esoteric gap that has existed since Steven Taylor’s spectacular decline and exit from international cricket in late 2024. Jayasuriya has filled that gap well: he's the second highest scoring left handed batsman for the USA this cycle behind Harmeet Singh, who has played four times the innings Jayasuriya has. One might argue that Jayasuryia is or was the roster pressure for other top order bats that forced a dipping Andries Gous into a T20 specialist role, but the point is that the pool for left-handed batting is not large enough to even yield a "next man up" if the staff is committed to keeping Jayasuriya’s role occupied.
The closest the USA has to a viable supplement or successor is probably uncapped Baltimore Royals opener Kunwarjeet Singh. The 27-year-old has showed well in limited viewings. He held on through the Opener Rodeo on a brutal Lauderhill track where he finished as the high-scorer for MINY with 33(30) batting second, and his 23*(13) as a finisher in the MLC grand final helped get the eventual champs over the line to a defendable score. He was also good for Baltimore last fall with four 50s in 13 innings and a stout 37.1 average at a 138 strike rate. All of that being said, Kunwarjeet doesn’t really have anywhere to showcase his 50-over bona fides and may need a breakout MLC campaign this summer to justify a call-up in October.
Everyone beyond that feels speculative at best. Prannav Chettipalayam will have to get out of MiLC’s East Division to show some batting wares like he did as an opener in the Houston Open this spring. Agni Chopra could still rebound and did somewhat with Baltimore last fall, and Ali Sheikh or Adit Kappa could reinvent himself as an opener, but now we're getting into ifs and buts and candies and nuts. Merry Christmas.
Having a couple of extra lefties in the order somewhere probably wouldn’t hurt, though. Jayasuriya was the high-scorer for the United States again on Monday, but this time for just 34 on a hideous pitch at Maple Leaf Cricket Ground, and the team sputtered and eventually fell apart 22 runs short of the target set by the Netherlands. His departure opened up all manner of tactical options for Scott Edwards culminating in a return to pace to clean up the middle order and then spin against the tail, with Harmeet - a bowling allrounder and the only other lefty in the lineup - mustering just five runs from 23.
This is a talent pool issue that stems from the lack of lateral growth and diversification of cricket’s domestic player base. The game has grown, but it still operates in a silo of people who know about it, have the disposable income to finance their own development, and who live in sufficient proximity to enough like-minded people to achieve critical mass for a private academy and/or travel ball team. Take 6.1 million Indian Americans and boil that number down accordingly, then also boil it down further to left-handed boys aged 15-19 who want to play cricket and are good enough to play it professionally, and you see why it’s important to expand the game’s reach beyond those predisposed to it. That’s normally the responsibility of a country’s cricket board… I’m not ready to go there until Judge Michael Romero has put forward an opinion.
It’s something that will not be fixed overnight, certainly not in time for the USA to take on Canada again on Friday at MLCC, when they’ll have a chance to clinch a spot in the Cricket World Cup Qualifier and ODI status through 2031 with a win.
Can we talk about that facility for a minute, though? MLCC has to be the worst playing surface in ODI cricket. If anyone thought the pitch at Lord's was bad last week, they should have had a peek at King City. The bounce was erratic, sure, but also the outfield looked like it hadn't been cut all weekend. Never mind that there appeared to be another pitch on the opposite end of the "square" that looked like it might actually be dirt.
I am what some in especially obnoxious Reddit circles might call a "Bowlshevik" in contrast to the "Batriarchy" that has become so fashionable for decision-makers in cricket, which is probably why I enjoy test cricket so much: fewer restrictions on bowlers means guys can really let it rip, and batting is more about picking spots to attack than turning the bowler into a living JUGS machine. The flat, hard decks that dominate much of the IPL season gave way to more balanced wickets in the playoffs, but that only got the critics to sit down rather than buy into any notion of that being the norm going forward. That's not to say that Lord's or MLCC is the tonic for that particular sporting ill. It's very clearly not, but there needs to be a uniform standard in pitch preparation for ICC-sanctioned events. Attacking at Lord’s was extremely difficult; at MLCC, it was impossible.
The ICC's Pitch Curation Foundation Program tells its students that the scoring mark for a good test or one-day pitch is around 30 runs per fallen wicket. At Maple Leaf on Monday, it was 20.6 after being 46.6 in a lopsided game on Saturday, but an even occurrence of extremes is not a substitute for balance. For reference, in the ODI between Bangladesh and Australia that I'm watching as I finish up this piece on Tuesday morning, it's 26, but it's only that low because Australia's batting has fallen apart. Bangladesh scored 284/8, which is 35.5 runs per wicket lost. That would read as slightly batter-friendly, but it’s close enough to the target that the caliber of batting versus bowling comes into play, and Bangladesh has been the better team all day and into the evening.
There is endless discussion about pitch conditions in cricket and too many different approaches around the world creating radically varied results and producing substandard games of cricket. Too many countries' groundskeepers are doctoring home pitches to produce extreme conditions coughPAKISTANcough that favor bat or ball or a specific kind of bowling. Canada, meanwhile, has failed to maintain any international-caliber playing surfaces in the entire country, or at least isn’t using them if they have. The simplest way to do this is for the ICC to put pitch curation under a joint set of rules designed to produce that optimal target, otherwise we'll all just keep moaning about playing surfaces created by people who operate on their own varied instincts instead of working to a uniform guide to produce competitive, entertaining games. Canada should be held to a higher standard if it's hosting ODI matches and that status is to carry the weight the ICC seems insistent on attaching to it.
It's high past time for the ICC to intervene, because, like everything else, the interest of the boards and the interest of the sport have quite a bit of daylight between them. The ICC is the boards, though, so they’d have to vote to surrender power and influence for a greater good. Fat chance of that happening.
Meanwhile, the USA will be hoping for steady daylight on Friday in King City - surprise, rain is in the forecast again. Aaman Patel might be adding mud wrestling to his demo reel this weekend.