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Blimey, It's Cricket: Players declare the long games fine reminders of homelands
Journal Photo by Bruce Chapman
Bivinder Pal bowls to Ragu Gopalan as fellow batsman Geoffrey Roberts (right) watches. The Tanglewood team plays in the Mid-Atlantic Cricket Conference.
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Published: September 5, 2008
CLEMMONS -- The bilingual cheers echo around the green field like the thuck, thuck, thuck fire of bats hitting balls.
"Shabash, shabash, shabash!" the men scattered around the field yell, a Hindi expression that's the verbal equivalent of a pat on the back. Another ball heads toward the men, their hands open to the blue sky. It's English this time. "Catchitcatchitcatchit!" someone screams.
This is cricket in Forsyth County, a game imported largely by local Indian immigrants just as ethnic grocery stores sell 10-pound bags of basmati rice and lentils, or restaurants that have menus with scarlet-colored tandoori chicken and charred naan.
What soccer is to South Americans and Europeans, cricket is to much of South Asia and virtually any country once under the long arm of the British Empire. Australia, India, Sri Lanka and South Africa are among the top cricket teams in the world.
The United States, though, is a glaring exception. More than a billion people worldwide follow this wildly competitive sport. But if you say "cricket" in this country, most people will think you're talking about a bug or a cell-phone company.
So in a country preoccupied with the World Series and the Super Bowl, small pockets of people, most of them immigrants from cricket-crazy countries, keep the game alive.
In Winston-Salem, some of these players make up the Tanglewood Wanderers, an amateur team that is one of 32 in the Mid-Atlantic Cricket Conference. The league is part of the United States of America Cricket Association. Another Winston-Salem team is trying to join the league by next season. They play at Piney Grove, a city park.
The Wanderers play at Tanglewood Park, where serious cricket spectators are likely to be outnumbered by joggers, bikers or horseback riders passing by. Cricket here is played for the joy of it, not for the glory.
Two 11-player teams
Cricket is played by two, 11-player teams. They take turns in the field (defense) and at bat (offense). Batsmen stand at either end of the cricket pitch. They usually score by hitting and then swapping places, or more rarely, by hitting the ball out of the field. Among the ways the fielding team can get batsmen out are by catching the ball or using it to knock down a wicket. A wicket is made of two wooden spindles balanced on three wooden stakes. Wickets are set up on either end of the pitch.
The Wanderers play at Tanglewood about twice a month over the summer. Team members travel for away matches across North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia.
On Aug. 17, the Wanderers played one of their final games of the regular season against South Park Cricket Club, a Charlotte team.
The Wanderers batted first, so most of the team sat in lawn chairs on the sidelines as two batsmen in helmets and leg pads took the field, bumping fists as they walked toward the batting area, known as the pitch. The Charlotte players spread around the cricket field like a constellation, their traditional white pants and shirts vivid against the grass.
From the sidelines, the Wanderers grumbled about the damp grass, still slippery with dew at 11 a.m. The sky was heavy and gray, a blanket of bumpy cotton. The red balls were so wet that they left stains on the bowlers' white shirts, and they weren't traveling far, making it harder to score.
It didn't take long for Mayur Choudhary, one of the Wanderers' first batsmen, to get out. The umpire ruled that he was out "leg before wicket." The ball would have hit the wicket if it had not been blocked by his leg. Before getting out, Choudhary scored 22 runs -- not up to his expectations. An excellent batsman can score 100 runs, or more, known in cricket slang as a century. Choudhary trudged to the sideline and slumped deep in a lawn chair. Within minutes he was up, pacing the sidelines and shouting toward the pitch.
"Eyes on the ball, eyes on the ball," the players yelled as the Charlotte team picked off one Wanderer after another, getting them out one by one.
Rohan Ranadive picked up a bat and headed toward the pitch. "Single, single, single," Mayuresh Sahasrabudhe, the team's captain, called after him. He wanted Ranadive to be careful about when he thought it was safe to run to the other batting area on the pitch.
Ranadive stood on the pitch as the bowler came loping toward him, his arm like a windmill and wound up, setting the small ball free. Ranadive held his bat like a golf club. He sliced at the ball with an underhand scoop. Thuck. A cherry-red smear whirled to his right, arching toward a sunken line in the grass, the field's boundary. The umpire walked toward the ball, peering at where it had landed. If it sailed over the boundary without touching the ground, it would be a six, cricket's version of a grand slam. "Fight for it!" the players on the sidelines called, then roared in approval. "It's a six!"
Colonial pastime
Cricket was possibly the best-known team sport in the United States around the Civil War, according to Tom Melville, the author of The Tented Field: A History of Cricket in America. Melville lives in Milwaukee, Wis.
William Byrd, a Virginia plantation owner, played cricket as early as 1709, according to his diaries. Indentured servants in Savannah played cricket. George Washington's troops may have played a version of the game called "wickets." Steel workers in Chicago, coal miners in Pennsylvania, carpenters and carriage makers in New Jersey all played cricket, experts say.
"It was pretty much like baseball. It appealed to all levels," Melville said in a phone interview.
Organized cricket took off in New York and Philadelphia in the 1830s, according to George Kirsch, a history professor at Manhattan College and the author of Baseball and Cricket: The Creation of American Team Sports, 1838-1872.
Gradually the game gained a reputation as a sport of the elite. The Philadelphia Cricket Club still exists -- as a country club where people mainly play golf and tennis. Immigrants from Sri Lanka, Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad, India and Pakistan now make up the roster at one of the oldest cricket clubs in the United States, the Staten Island Cricket Club.
Why cricket didn't have staying power in America is a mystery.
Some say that the game became dominated by the upper class and didn't appeal to the masses. Some say that it never became popular because it remained amateur. Others say that cricket began to lose out to baseball because baseball had faster transitions between offense and defense. And cricket, Melville said, never became quite "American" enough.
"The cricket that was played in the United States at that time was played by British immigrants, and even those who took it up bought into this Britishness," Melville said. "It's sort of like keeping alive customs from the homeland. But that's not something that's going to appeal to Americans. They have their own customs and traditions. It's a little hard to nail down what that is, but it seems to me that's what kept it from growing in the past and now.
"You can find cricket in every large city in the United States, but it's strictly amateur," Melville said. "It's pretty much invisible to the American public. I think the best analogy would be something like soccer was 40 years ago."
Very long games
The game has other challenges.
"Test matches" are the oldest form of cricket. They're called that for a reason -- the games last as long as five days. The Wanderers play matches which usually last the better part of a day. The recent match against Charlotte took five hours.
Despite shorter versions and modern concessions such as cheerleaders at some matches, cricket hasn't been played in the Olympics since 1900, the game's only Olympic appearance.
The United States of America Cricket Association is trying to promote the game through a 45-minute version targeted at children 10 and under, said Gladstone Dainty, the association's president. "That's how it was introduced to us as kids growing up. We grew up playing with a little ball in the front yard.
"I don't think the sport can grow any faster without outside interest, education and significant involvement by the American public," he said.
Gladstone estimated that 10,000 people play cricket seriously in the U.S. Yankee Stadium would swallow them.
But so would Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai, India. The stadium has a seating capacity of about 45,000 and will be the site of the Cricket World Cup finals in 2011.
Much of life revolves around cricket in India. The country's official sport may be field hockey, but cricket is practically a religion, said Sahasrabudhe, the Wanderers' captain. Its players are revered like gods.
"It's a regular part of you, cricket back in India. Any Indian you talk to, they'll know at least something about cricket."
Ranadive is a founding member of the team. He remembers people in India rearranging their work schedules or cutting class during key cricket matches. They would gather in homes and in front of televisions in stores. "You'd have people on transistors and radios listening to the score. And now of course with the new generation you get instant updates on your desktop or mobile phone."
Growing up in India, young boys play cricket anywhere they can -- in crowded cities, where land is a luxury, that often means in alleys, on terraces or in the street.
When he was a boy in Mumbai, Sahasrabudhe played cricket on the concrete road in front of his apartment building.
School ended at 4:45 p.m. By 5:15, he'd be out there with his bat.
"We didn't waste any time getting down and playing the sport. It was not that you had to be an expert at playing the game; it was more like getting together and hanging out with friends."
Playing in the road inevitably led to broken windows and arguments with neighbors. He remembered one day in particular when he smacked the ball with his favorite "hook" shot. It broke a neighbor's window. The glass landed in some curry waiting for their dinner in the kitchen.
Sahasrabudhe played cricket on and off until he came to the United States in 2000 for a job as a computer database administrator for Lowe's Home Improvement. He lived in a Boston suburb and then New York before moving to Wilkesboro. Today, he lives in Winston-Salem.
His wife was a student in Wake Forest University's MBA program from 2002 to 2004. Through her, he met some other students and heard about a pickup game on campus.
Ranadive remembers playing cricket at Tanglewood during team-building exercises when he worked at Republic Mortgage Insurance Co. Many people working in the IT department were from India, he said.
"Once you know that someone is playing cricket, you'll find a lot of people from India and Pakistan will start going and start playing the sport," Sahasrabudhe said. "It's a small Indian community here in Winston-Salem, so you attend a lot of functions together. So once you go and find out someone's playing cricket, there's automatic interest for other people to come and join in."
These middle-age men love cricket so much that Ranadive and a group of Indian friends rented an apartment for a month on Indiana Avenue to watch the 2003 Cricket World Cup. They rented a big television, got a satellite connection and watched the games together. The games started around 2:30 a.m. Luckily most were on the weekend, Ranadive said.
"More than the connection, I think it's people coming together. It's pretty hard to put that in words," Ranadive said. "I mean, cricket is such a funny game. You might spend an entire eight hours on the field and not accomplish anything on an individual basis. You might get out on the first ball, and you may never, ever bowl and you might be in the field fielding … when you're like ‘What did I do today? I just stood in the sun and fielded the ball for three and a half hours and here I am, our team won the game, and that's what important.'"
Field at Tanglewood
In 2005, Ranadive and some other cricket players approached Gordon McEachran, Tanglewood's director of tennis and recreation, about setting up a cricket field.
McEachran -- a New Zealand native who played cricket as a boy -- thought that a field near the park's entrance would be a good home for the Wanderers. The field is in the middle of an unused training track for race horses.
Park workers rolled the ground flat and laid down sod. They poured concrete for practice batting areas and bought and laid down plastic webbing for the pitch, spending about $5,500 to get the field in shape, according to Clinton Ingram, the park's maintenance manager.
On one side, McEachran had four flag poles erected. On them, the flags of India, South Africa, Great Britain and the United States catch the breeze.
Last year, the Wanderers joined the Mid-Atlantic league. There are about 30 members on the Wanderers this year. Each member pays $125 a year for a season that lasts from the spring to fall. The fees go to Tanglewood for the field's maintenance and the park's entrance fee.
It was McEachran who gave the team its name. It comes from the idea that the team's players are international wanderers -- many of them go back and forth between India and Winston-Salem for work or to visit family. Wanderers is also the name of a cricket stadium in South Africa.
Tanglewood doesn't have money to promote cricket, but McEachran still feels strongly that the game has a place at the park. "People should know about other sports," he said.
To the Wanderers, being able to play cricket is about having a piece of home, even when they lose, as they did on a recent Sunday. Charlotte won 86 to 85, getting seven of the Wanderers' batsman out (scores for cricket games are often that close; what matters more is how many wickets each team has, because it shows how fast the second team at bat can beat the score of the first team at bat).
The Charlotte team packed its pads and bats, its trash and the coolers from a lunch-break picnic of watermelon and biyrani, an Indian rice dish.
The Wanderers sat in the grass and replayed the match. A win would have assured them a higher ranking and possibly a home game for the first round of playoffs. Because of the loss, they'll have to travel for their first playoff game to Columbia, S.C., on Sept. 13. "We are grown men. We are not boys," one of the Wanderers, Biv Pal, shrugged. "These things happen."
The team picked up half-empty Powerade bottles and cricket balls worn to a dull burgundy. They shoved leg pads into duffel bags. The sun had come out and the grass was dry, but it was time to go home.
"Cricket is something that flows in the veins of a lot of people. It means a lot to be able to play in another country. It's a part of our daily life now, and it was part of our daily life back then, so having grown up with it, to kind of have a part of your life again…" Sahasrabudhe paused. "It is wonderful."
■ Laura Giovanelli can be reached at 727-7302 or at giovanelli@wsjournal.com.
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