You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack,
And you may find yourself in another part of the world,
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
You may find yourself living in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?
I'm not good at introductions.
Wait, that's a lie. I'm very good at in-person introductions, just not written ones. It's hard not to be trite or overshare, and I struggle to write succinctly because I write how I speak, and I love speaking.
Before I Jake Fraser-McGurk myself straight back to the pavilion - welcome to Stumps & Stripes! A newsletter/column/mission/quest/thing from the hills of the American interior by an overall average white guy. Which seems kind of rare in American cricket? Peter Della Penna shouldn’t be the only one keeping that fire burning… emphasis on fire. (I say that with fondness for Peter’s work - somebody’s gotta do it.)
So, a little about me: I am, as mentioned above, not an NRI. I am not part of any Commonwealth diaspora, nor do I live in New Jersey, DFW, Miami, or San Francisco. I do not work in tech. I'm a middle-class-ish white dude living in southern Appalachia, where it's really freaking hard to find a flat space big enough to play cricket without some well-placed dynamite. I don't own a bat (yet), or gloves (yet), and I own one single solitary Kookaburra ball that is a handy fidget during my day job that I haven't even thought about throwing at anyone (yet). But what I do have is a joy derived from watching cricket and nobody to really discuss it with in my community. So I'm writing about it, and hopefully connecting with other American cricket fans along the way, including and especially those from outside the traditional circles who don't have a clue what they're wading into or do and, like me, just don't have a lot of people to talk about it with. As the sport grows, gaps need bridging, and I’m down to lay the first anxious plank across at least one of those gaps.
I built a life for myself on a foundation of sports. I have worked in sports media for 16 years in some capacity or another, not too far off half my life, and I love exploring weird, niche things that make other people look at me funny. I was the biggest hockey fan at my middle school in 8th grade in Tennessee; people thought I was speaking a different language. I was the biggest NASCAR fan in Fargo, North Dakota, fully separated from my Southern roots, partly because I was homesick and partly because it was funny to watch people be really confused until I found the one other person who was REALLY into racing and spent an hour talking to them, then saw them at the dirt track on Friday nights in the summers.
All of that makes this make sense. I first watched cricket in December 2010, an ODI in the middle of the night between Zimbabwe and Bangladesh on what was then ESPN3; and, somehow, I wasn't completely scared off by that. I was gripped by the 2019 World Cup and the Ashes series that followed, but, like many Americans, I finally jumped all the way in with the 2024 T20 World Cup. Cricket is a really weird game with immense charm that affords an opportunity to stop and savor it in ways other sports don't while still providing that same rush when something remarkable happens. Test cricket isn't that much different from college football in terms of the culture, hierarchy, and stakes of the game. I know a ton about college football, so vibing with Test cricket was easy, and I love seeing "USA" across the front of a jersey, so the white ball game wasn't much different. There is also a wave of optimism around this sport that doesn't exist in other American landscapes because cricket is in the midst of a boom.
So here we are, living in a shotgun shack that is the empty husk of a newsletter, talking about the most popular sport in another part of the world. I intend to fill the aforementioned shack with analysis of US cricket, both domestic and international, men's and eventually women's as I wrap my head around the state of that team, and the perspective I have of someone who comes from a very different sports landscape than most people in cricket. And if this goes REALLY well, there might even be interviews or a podcast at some point. For now, it's the place where I put my ideas about this game I arrived to neither late nor early, but exactly when I meant to. Same as it ever was.