The skyscrapers of Manhattan are built on cricket fields. There was one under Pier 17 at the East River seaport, another under the north meadow in Central Park, and a third on the right at 1st Avenue and east 32nd Street, under the NYU Langone Medical Center parking lot.

In 1844, about 5,000 New Yorkers attended the first international match in the middle of the United States and Canada there. “Cricket was the first modern team sport in America,” says Chuck Ramkissoon in Joseph O’Neill’s great New York Novel, Netherland, “a real American pastime”. He’s right. Once upon a time.

In the middle of the XIX century, there were dozens, if not hundreds of Clubs in the United States. Historians have never settled on a single reason why Cricket died there. The Civil War was a factor. “Then we had a large number of good young men playing the game, and then the fever of war overtook them,” wrote an American Cricketer at the starting of the twentieth century.

There were places where they continued to play Cricket, especially around Philadelphia, but even this scene stopped during the First World War.

Which made the Netherlands a difficult Novel to sell. “When I wrote it, people asked ‘”What is it about?””, says O’Neill. “I would say, “It’s about Cricket in New York,” and people didn’t know what to reciprocate. It really didn’t seem very promising.”

O’Neill played himself. “When I first came to New York in 1998, it was all about driving and seeing people playing Cricket stop and ask them, “Can I play?’”

In the outskirts there was always more Cricket than anyone except the players knew. “It’s a very different Cricket culture,” O’Neill says. “People who like Cricket here often take taxis all night.”

Everyone I talk to in American Cricket seems to be chasing a dream of one kind or another, even if it’s just a little weekend away to play the game they loved in the house they left behind. “There is a reason why they call it the country of unlimited possibilities,” says Ali Khan.

He was a young basketball player when his family left Pakistan. He assumed he had to give up Cricket because he didn’t think they played it in the States until his uncle took him to their local Club in Dayton, Ohio. He played his first real match on the same weekend. Now he will open Bowling for the national team at the T20 World Championship.