It’s pretty easy to find the little cricket ground that hosts the opening match of the T20 World Cup, just turn right when you get to the three giant chrome dinosaurs outside Ripley’s believe it or not! and follow the road around the multi-colored replica of the Taj Mahal. The most difficult thing is to find someone who knows something about what he is doing there in the spotlight. “It’s dead today,” says the lady behind the car rental office at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. “Is there something going on this weekend?”Your colleague is not looking up. “No,” he said, ” I’ve been looking.”
The T20 World Championship came to the USA with all the fanfare of a broken kazoo. No matter what the ICC has spent its Saudi Arabian oil sponsorship on, it’s not a field advertisement here in Dallas. June at Saddlehorn Park has a greater poster presence on the streets around the site. Only when you enter the room do you know that there is a World Championship.
The place itself is quite pretty, a small after with 6,000 seats in an empty park. It was built as a baseball stadium and was once the home of the Texas Airhogs. American Cricket Enterprises, the company behind Major League Cricket, spent to redevelop the site. “I hope that when you enter on June 1, you will feel like you are in every full member country in the world,” Vijay Srinivasan, CEO of MLC, told me. “That’s what we were aiming for, and you know, we did it with a very small team and without spending a lot of money.”
They have had hard times in the last few days. In Dallas, there were severe storms and flash Overflows and power outages in the region on Thursday. The planned practice match of the USA against Nepal has been postpone and further bad weather conditions are planned for the weekend. But the place still seems to be pretty well occupied, and the team did an hour of training on the outdoor lawful in the morning, while the technical teams evacuated the necessary for the broadcast of their opening match against Canada (Sunday, 1: 30 am BST start). The two teams faced each other for the first time in 184they had hard times in recent days. In Dallas, there were severe storms and flash Overflows and power outages in the region on Thursday. The planned practice match of the USA against Nepal has been postpone and further bad weather conditions are planned for the weekend. But the place still seems to be pretty well occupied, and the team did an hour of training on the outdoor lawful in the morning, while the technical teams evacuated the necessary for the broadcast of their opening match against Canada (Sunday, 1: 30 am BST start). The two teams first competed against each other in 1844. This is the oldest rivalry in sports. And the darkest.
The waitress at the hotel across the street shrugs her shoulders. The headmistress, who has just quit, says yes, she loves cricket because she moved here from Trinidad, but she doesn’t know what’s going on in the stadium. None of the six customers who make up the lunch rush at the nearby Mexican restaurant have a clue, but one of them wonders if it has something to do with the game they play on the way to middle school. They started talking about the Mavericks and their chances again, withthe waitress at the hotel across the street shrugging her shoulders. The headmistress, who has just quit, says yes, she loves cricket because she moved here from Trinidad, but she doesn’t know what’s going on in the stadium. None of the six customers who make up the lunch rush at the nearby Mexican restaurant have a clue, but one of them wonders if it has something to do with the game they play on the way to middle school. They talked again about the Mavericks and their chances against the Timberwolves in the playoffs. Grillon? Grill.
I went on and was looking for someone, someone who knew that there was a World Championship. After four hours and 15 miles of driving, I finally find him in the parking lot of the Swadeshi Plaza grocery store in the Valley Ranch neighborhood. His name is Dilip, he was born in Nepal and is the proud owner of a ticket for the match against The Netherlands on Tuesday. He even takes out his phone to prove it. He is absolutely convinced that England will have to choose this “little left-hander who plays for the Punjab Kings” (Sam Curran) if they want to go anywhere in the tournament.
Valley Ranch is a big part of the reason MLC is at home here. It is a planned community that was built in the 1970s, but after a few decades of chain migration it became the home of a great Native American community. According to the census, more than a third of the residents here have Indian ancestors, and more than a sixth were born in India. The convenience stores here do not carry Coca-Cola and have small kitchens at the back selling homemade samosas and dosas, pani puri and vada pav. The people I meet at Valley Ranch are surprised when I ask if they also know about the World Cup, but only because they wonder how anyone could imagine that they didn’t know.