Major League Cricket launches in US with 6 teams

[RennisDeynolds]

American Cricket will have the same in-person viewership as the WNBA.​

Nah there are a lot of Indians around, Caribbean, and internationals as well. They'll get an audience for male sports no matter what

 

[Dafunkdoc_Unlimited]

Nah there are a lot of Indians around, Caribbean, and internationals as well. They'll get an audience for male sports no matter what

There's a lot of women around.

WNBA game stands are empty.​

 

[RennisDeynolds]

There's a lot of women around.

WNBA game stands are empty.​

Yeah bc women do not care about women sports by and large. On they are out of school they don't give a fukk about it.

Only women's national soccer draws crowds

 

[UpAndComing]

Guyanese and Trinidadians in NYC bout to dominate

 

[get these nets]

Gayle for 20/20 you're talking goat tier player, probably Shaq. Somebody who used raw power to overwhelm.

Thanks

 

[get these nets]

Final is set. Worked out for the league that the NY metro area team is playing.


They played this brief season outdoors during historic heat waves, and fans still showed up to the venues in droves. Wow!

 

[50CentStan]

Cricket is the stupidest game ever they get a damn tea break and single games can go 7 days smh

 

[get these nets]

 

[Professor Emeritus]

im gonna be honest, i always wondered why cricket was never a thing in the us

It's got a lot of strikes against it. Even if you take out the insanely long games and only focus on the shorter formats, you still have the fact that it's an unathletic and somewhat random sport.


#1. It's just not very athletic at all. Imagine baseball, but if literally every aspect of the sport was made less athletic. Pitching uses less muscles (you're basically not allowed to bend the elbow) and in T20, no pitcher can throw more than 24 balls so endurance is irrelevant. Batters have a huge wide bat to swing with and don't even have to put everything into the swing to hit it out of the park, so strength, bat speed, and even reaction time/coordination are less relevant. Baserunning is far less important, because there are only 60 feet between the wickets and players can avoid running unless they're sure they're going to make it. Fielding is most relevant when there's a fly ball in play, which will only happen a few times in any match. Also, they don't have to run as far to catch a fly ball because they cover far less space than a baseball outfielder does. When anything other than a fly ball is hit, fielders can run a little faster to cut off a boundary but you often see them dogging it, and actual throws that matter are rare as fukk because the runners aren't going to go if there's a chance you'll throw them out.

India is literally campaigning to try to get schoolkids to play a sport other than cricket, because cricket does nothing to improve their physical health. They just stand around the whole time.


#2. Because every player only gets one out, day-to-day scoring is random and arbitrary as fukk. Imagine that you had a player who tends to get out once every 50 balls. Well, one day he might get out on ball 2 and have only scored 1 run. The next day he might get out on ball 72 and score 70 runs. He's the exact same player both days, but pure random variance can cause dramatically different results.

Imagine if you went to watch Barry Bonds play, and he flew out to the warning track on the first pitch and that was it for the day. Or imagine you went to see LeBron James, and he got called for a debatable offensive foul two minutes into the first quarter and had to sit the rest of the game. That's how cricket works.


#3. On the other hand, if someone gets hot, they can keep batting the whole rest of the game and you never see anyone else go up. You can have a match where only 4-5 guys on your squad actually go up to bat, and no one else even gets a chance.


#4. The format of "One team does all their batting and then the other team does all their batting" is unlike any other sport and takes a ton of drama out of the game. If a team has its top batters dismissed early, then the match can be pretty much over less than halfway through the first team's overs and the outcome is damn near determined before the other squad has even come up to the plate. Imagine watching the Suns play the Celtics, only the Suns go on offense every possession in the first half and the Celtics get every possession in the second half. Then KD and Booker both foul out 5 minutes into the game, and the rest of the match is a foregone conclusion with zero drama because you know the Celtics will easily outscore whatever the Suns' scrubs put up. Or imagine that KD and Booker both put up 40+ in the first half and the Suns score 148 as a team, you already know the Celtics can't match that so their offensive turn becomes irrelevant.

It also limits how many players can be "clutch" at the end of a match, since only a couple guys on one team are batting, with no chance for the other to match, and only one guy on the other team is bowling. And in many cases your best players have been dismissed, so unless you have a clutch specialist in the middle-late order, you're stuck with hoping one of your lesser batters balls out, instead of seeing what a great player can do with the pressure on.




All those issues with the format is why cricket is basically only popular where it is a tradition. Everyone who plays was an old-school British colony who only plays the sport because the Brits did it while they were colonizing them. New countries just don't pick the sport up at any advanced level. The four UK countries, the six South Asian countries, Australia/New Zealand, a few Carribean nations, and South Africa/Zimbabwae are pretty much the only places that care about cricket at all. It doesn't have the growing global appeal that sports like soccer and basketball and UFC show, you pretty much only see new countries get interested via immigration.

 

[parallax]

...so its a sport for unathletic people..

 

[JoseLuisGotcha]

bruuuu how am i gonna catch an uber if everyone at the game?

 

[HiphopRelated]

It's got a lot of strikes against it. Even if you take out the insanely long games and only focus on the shorter formats, you still have the fact that it's an unathletic and somewhat random sport.


#1. It's just not very athletic at all. Imagine baseball, but if literally every aspect of the sport was made less athletic. Pitching uses less muscles (you're basically not allowed to bend the elbow) and in T20, no pitcher can throw more than 24 balls so endurance is irrelevant. Batters have a huge wide bat to swing with and don't even have to put everything into the swing to hit it out of the park, so strength, bat speed, and even reaction time/coordination are less relevant. Baserunning is far less important, because there are only 60 feet between the wickets and players can avoid running unless they're sure they're going to make it. Fielding is most relevant when there's a fly ball in play, which will only happen a few times in any match. Also, they don't have to run as far to catch a fly ball because they cover far less space than a baseball outfielder does. When anything other than a fly ball is hit, fielders can run a little faster to cut off a boundary but you often see them dogging it, and actual throws that matter are rare as fukk because the runners aren't going to go if there's a chance you'll throw them out.

India is literally campaigning to try to get schoolkids to play a sport other than cricket, because cricket does nothing to improve their physical health. They just stand around the whole time.


#2. Because every player only gets one out, day-to-day scoring is random and arbitrary as fukk. Imagine that you had a player who tends to get out once every 50 balls. Well, one day he might get out on ball 2 and have only scored 1 run. The next day he might get out on ball 72 and score 70 runs. He's the exact same player both days, but pure random variance can cause dramatically different results.

Imagine if you went to watch Barry Bonds play, and he flew out to the warning track on the first pitch and that was it for the day. Or imagine you went to see LeBron James, and he got called for a debatable offensive foul two minutes into the first quarter and had to sit the rest of the game. That's how cricket works.


#3. On the other hand, if someone gets hot, they can keep batting the whole rest of the game and you never see anyone else go up. You can have a match where only 4-5 guys on your squad actually go up to bat, and no one else even gets a chance.


#4. The format of "One team does all their batting and then the other team does all their batting" is unlike any other sport and takes a ton of drama out of the game. If a team has its top batters dismissed early, then the match can be pretty much over less than halfway through the first team's overs and the outcome is damn near determined before the other squad has even come up to the plate. Imagine watching the Suns play the Celtics, only the Suns go on offense every possession in the first half and the Celtics get every possession in the second half. Then KD and Booker both foul out 5 minutes into the game, and the rest of the match is a foregone conclusion with zero drama because you know the Celtics will easily outscore whatever the Suns' scrubs put up. Or imagine that KD and Booker both put up 40+ in the first half and the Suns score 148 as a team, you already know the Celtics can't match that so their offensive turn becomes irrelevant.

It also limits how many players can be "clutch" at the end of a match, since only a couple guys on one team are batting, with no chance for the other to match, and only one guy on the other team is bowling. And in many cases your best players have been dismissed, so unless you have a clutch specialist in the middle-late order, you're stuck with hoping one of your lesser batters balls out, instead of seeing what a great player can do with the pressure on.




All those issues with the format is why cricket is basically only popular where it is a tradition. Everyone who plays was an old-school British colony who only plays the sport because the Brits did it while they were colonizing them. New countries just don't pick the sport up at any advanced level. The four UK countries, the six South Asian countries, Australia/New Zealand, a few Carribean nations, and South Africa/Zimbabwae are pretty much the only places that care about cricket at all. It doesn't have the growing global appeal that sports like soccer and basketball and UFC show, you pretty much only see new countries get interested via immigration.

that's usually the Caribbean view on baseball funny enough, just inverted

 

[Professor Emeritus]

that's usually the Caribbean view on baseball funny enough, just inverted

Which part of it is "inverted"?

Baseball is demonstrably more athletic than cricket at every position. Everyone on the roster gets a chance. There's no extreme variance like the "could face 1 ball, could face 70" that cricket holds. And baseball has organically become popular in numerous countries without needing colonialism to carry it.


I agree that compared to other sports, baseball shares some of the same drawbacks as cricket. But compared to cricket, what are its shortcomings?

 

[HiphopRelated]

Which part of it is "inverted"?

Baseball is demonstrably more athletic than cricket at every position. Everyone on the roster gets a chance. There's no extreme variance like the "could face 1 ball, could face 70" that cricket holds. And baseball has organically become popular in numerous countries without needing colonialism to carry it.


I agree that compared to other sports, baseball shares some of the same drawbacks as cricket. But compared to cricket, what are its shortcomings?

A fast bowler has to run in to bowl, most of those dudes were also usually top athletes during high school. For test cricket you could be running in for hours in a day. This also contradicts your other point about variety in participation. In baseball you can see maybe only one or 2 players pitch, in cricket you need a range of dudes that can contribute. The pitcher also doesn't have to bat.

Catches have to be caught without gloves and a harder ball. I'm sure we can find a great catches compilation you will see it on par or better than anything in baseball.

There is also the thinking game of field placement. Where you're trying to put the field depending on the game situation instead of more rigid positions

The batting rewards consistency of a player. It's equivalent to a Lebron scoring 20 every night than the dude that scores 25 and then 10. 20 every night is the more dependable player. It's a test of focus. So that's where your clutch point comes in. If you want to be clutch you'll survive long enough to be in that position. You throw away the opportunity and it's only you to blame. Don't need 4 opportunities. If the best players were consistently getting out after a couple balls they wouldn't be the best players.

there's plenty drama in the chase because you generally know what a good score is already

---

So if a player outs early you will see the desperation start to creep in because every ball that passes without a score is one less available.

Oh and you def have to be strong to hit it out the park with any regularity.

And American colonialism through military bases and media was no different than the crooked teeth English in their time

 

[Blown Moon]

It's about to be crickets heard in those stadiums. They got the good ole us of a fukked up.