An American's Guide To Team USA’s cricket win over Pakistan

America beat Pakistan in cricket? At the World Cup? WITHIN DRIVING DISTANCE OF A BUC-EES? Everything you need to know about one of America’s biggest international sports upsets ever.

An American sports win made about a billion people happy Thursday. It’s rare that Team USA is an underdog in the world of international sports, but we are not a cricket country.

UNTIL NOW.

If you’d like to know the full context of what happened, the best thing you can do is ask an Indian cricket fan about it. I promise you they will be THRILLED to explain why Pakistan losing is such a big deal in gleeful detail.

But barring that, I’ve been following the USA cricket story pretty closely—I wrote about their win over Canada on Monday—and can try to fill you in with a roughly equivalent level of glee.

How big an upset is this?

Huge.

Pakistan is easily one of the best cricketing countries in the world. They have the second-best winning percentage in T20 cricket history, won the T20 World Cup in 2009, and finished runners-up to England in the last edition of the tournament. All-time, Pakistan had played 38 T20 and One Day International matches against current “associate members’ of the International Cricket Council—countries like Canada, Namibia, or Hong Kong. They were 38-0 before Thursday. Now it’s 38-1. (They had lost to teams like Bangladesh and Ireland, now full members of the ICC, back when they were on associate status.)

Team USA, on the other hand, had never been to the T20 World Cup, or any other major international cricket event. The Americans almost qualified for the last World Cup, but lost to The Netherlands in the game which would’ve gotten them in. (I hope the Dutch have a fun name for cricket like they do for baseball.)

Team USA had shown some recent hints they weren’t pushovers. In May, they played a 3-game series against Bangladesh as a tune-up, the strongest opponent they’d ever faced. They won two of three. And they opened the World Cup with a win over Canada, so it was clear they had a pulse.

But this is one of the biggest cricket upsets ever, because quite frankly, there simply haven’t been many matchups between teams like Pakistan and teams like the United States. Cricket commentator Aatif Nawaz, who called the game for BBC, said, “never thought I'd ever see that fixture, never mind that result.”

This isn’t like the NCAA Tournament, where 1-seeds play 16-seeds every year, and have for decades. This is the largest World Cup ever… and it only has 20 teams in it. There are only a few countries where they play cricket, including places like Pakistan where cricket is the most popular sport among a population of hundreds of millions. There hasn’t been a lot of demand or competitive reason for those countries to play opponents from places where cricket is a niche sport. But the quest to expand led to opportunities like this, and America is the land of opportunity. They crushed it.

So this is their first time in the World Cup?

Yep!

How are they doing?

They’re 2-0, in first place.

So they’ve never lost, ever?

DAMN RIGHT. UNDEFEATED ALL-TIME, BEST RECORD ON THE PLANET.

How’d the Americans win?

Team USA was clutch, Pakistan choked. It sounds simplistic, but the Americans played like they’d been there before even though they literally hadn’t.

With six balls left in the game, the Americans needed to score 14 runs—roughly double the rate they’d been scoring to that point. They got exactly 14 runs, with Nitish Kumar hitting a 4-run shot to the boundary on the final do-or-die ball of the game to tie things up.

That forced cricket’s version of overtime, the Super Over—six balls for each team to score as many runs as possible. But Pakistan fell apart with sloppy play. They bowled three wide balls—in baseball terms, wild pitches, balls thrown so far outside the hitting area that they don’t count as legal. Because Pakistan threw three wides, Team USA had nine balls to score in the Super Over instead of six. The Americans scored six runs off those three wides and won by five.

Don’t cricket matches last for a week?

That’s test cricket. This is a format called T20 cricket, developed in the 2000’s with the aim of making games faster and more exciting—and also creating upsets like this one.

Tests are marathons where each team bats until everybody on their team is out. The best team will almost always win tests, but they last for days, making them unpalatable to modern fans and rendering a World Cup-style tournament impossible. In T20, each team gets 120 balls to score as much as they can, and the game is over in a few hours.

T20 is more prone to surprising results simply because of the smaller sample size—but also because the different rules lead to a different playing style. In test cricket, the worst thing a batsman can do is get out, so they’re incentivized to play defensively and stay alive. They’re not going to try to hit the ball over the fence, because more aggressive swings lead to a higher likelihood of getting out. In T20, the worst thing a batsman can do is waste any of those 120 balls. That leads to riskier play, bigger swings, more scoring, and more mistakes.

Pakistan went big and paid for it. One of their sluggers, the massive Azam Khan, swung and missed at the very first ball he faced, scoring zero runs—a “golden duck,” in cricket speak. Every USA player to bat scored at least 12 runs; Pakistan had four players dismissed with 11 runs or less.

Team USA beating Pakistan is like a 16-seed beating a 1-seed—but the T20 World Cup is like a version of the NCAA Tournament where games are just 10 minutes long and everybody spends the whole time shooting threes.

Has anyone heard from the guy who said the average American’s head would “simply explode” if they saw top-level cricket?

He has not commented yet.

So how did Team USA get into the World Cup?

The world screwed up. They let us host the tournament, so we got in automatically. Fools! Never give America an automatic bid! Once you let us in you can’t get rid of us! (Seriously, ask any number of foreign countries about this. It’s a problem!)

Hold on, we’re hosting? This is happening in the United States?

Well, partially. The knockout rounds and the final will be held across the West Indies, with the final in Barbados, but 16 of the group stages matches are being held in America.

Do we have cricket stadiums?

Not really. This game was played in Grand Prairie, Texas, in the DFW metroplex. It’s a converted minor league park which USA Cricket has turned into their home base. There’s a second stadium in Broward County, but that’s it.

To host the tournament, they’ve built a temporary 30,000-seat stadium on Long Island, which is getting terrible reviews due to the inconvenient location, lack of parking, and slow playing surface. The ICC can say the games are being held in Dallas, Miami, and New York, but it’s a bit of a stretch.

Why is the Cricket World Cup being held in America?

The decision to hold some of the tournament in America was broadly billed as a “grow the game” move—America has a lot of money and a lot of people, so every sport wants their own 1994 FIFA World Cup to get us hooked.

But the execution has made it easy to question whether they actually tried to get Americans interested. We aren’t seeing ads for the games, which aren’t being broadcast on major TV. Here in NYC, hypothetically a host site, the only evidence I’ve seen that the tournament is taking place is that I saw a fan fest employee taking the A train home.

Many think the point of holding the tournament in the USA was not really to win over American fans, but to gouge money out of the high-earning South Asian community in the United States, willing to pay hundreds of dollars for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see their favorite teams in their favorite sport without having to fly overseas. (The feed of American cricket journalist Peter Della Panna, which I highly recommend, was filled with disappointed Indian-Americans who paid hundreds for bad seats at the temporary venue on Long Island.) Tickets for India-Pakistan are over $700, which is why I instead bought tickets to Ireland-Canada for $38.

However, I think Team USA might have accidentally done the game-growing the ICC was supposed to do. You’re welcome!

If Team USA is good at cricket now, what sports are we still bad at?

At this point, pretty much just handball and men’s fast-pitch softball. I know, I’m shocked too.

Who is on Team USA?

Everybody on this roster either an immigrant from a cricket-playing country or the child of immigrants from a cricket-playing country. In other words, they’re all Americans.

Only four players on the roster were born in the United States, and three of those (Aaron Jones, Noshtush Kenjige, and Jessy Singh) moved back to their family’s home country as children. Only Steven Taylor, from a Jamaican family in Florida, was born and raised here.

Some of the players on the team are new Americans with diaspora stories, like Ali Khan, who left all his cricket gear in Pakistan when he moved here because he didn’t think Americans played cricket, or Saurabh Netravalkar, who came from India to go to Cornell and works for Oracle as a software engineer when not playing cricket. Netravalkar won the game for Team USA by bowling in the Super Over, and now every Indian-American parent is going to ask their son why they can’t simultaneously be a software engineer and defeat Pakistan in cricket.

Some are players who moved to the United States specifically to play cricket. The most prominent of these is Corey Anderson, who was on the New Zealand team which finished runners-up at the 2015 Cricket World Cup before switching nationalities due to his American-born wife; Shadley van Schalkwyk is pretty open about the way he moved to America because he didn’t see any openings on the South African team.

But it’s not like this is a team of superstar cricket ringers disguised in red white and blue. Every one of these guys was overlooked by the cricket establishment somewhere else and now lives and plays here in America.

Some would argue this team doesn’t reflect American cricket prowess, since virtually none of the talent was developed by a grassroots cricket system. Others would argue a team of guys with accents and melanin doesn’t reflect America at all.

Well guess what, melting pot haters: this is what we do. I’m a first-generation American and it is my god-given right to cheer for an bunch of people who look nothing like me playing a sport I only kinda understand, and if you don’t like it you can move to a country that sucks at cricket, unlike America. Don’t let Lady Liberty hit you on the way out.

Okay, I’m intrigued. Can I watch Team USA’s next game?

LMAO, you’d think, right?

The games are being broadcast on something called “Willow TV,” an all-cricket, all-the-time channel. They have a streaming service available for $10 a month, although the Wikipedia page notes “Willow has been the subject of complaints about its billing practices, including making it impossible to unsubscribe through the website or app.” So maybe don’t sign up unless you’d like to be billed for a cricket channel for the rest of your life.

However, there’s a chance you get Willow if you’re subscribed to your cable company’s sports package—I figured this out just as Team USA was headed to the Super Over.

What does this mean going forward?

The Americans actually have a shot at going deep in this thing. They’re in a five-team group and the top two teams make it into the “Super 8” round. Everybody assumed those two teams would be India and Pakistan, but now Team USA has a leg up on Pakistan.

Unless lightning strikes twice, Team USA should lose to India, which likely means the important game is the June 14th game with Ireland. We can talk about what happens next after Team USA makes the Super 8 later. Let’s just get there for now.

What does this mean going forward… in the bigger picture?

This goes a long way towards establishing American cricket, something a lot of people have spent a lot of money trying to do. Last year was the first season of Major League Cricket, a startup league with dreams of franchises all across the country. As is, the 2024 season will be played entirely at the Grand Prairie Stadium and an additional venue in Morrisville, North Carolina. Most of the players on Team USA are signed to play in MLC, so maybe that venture will have a little bit more juice now that a few more Americans have typed “USA cricket” into their phones.

I expect Team USA to make the T20 World Cup pretty regularly going forward, even without hosting. Now that the tournament has expanded to 20 teams, there’s a slot reserved for a qualifier from the Americas region, which Canada won easily this time over opponents like Panama and the Cayman Islands. And Team USA has beaten Canada five times in a row, so that spot should be ours most of the time.

But the big ticket item is the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. The LA selection committee chose to add T20 cricket as one of its five optional sports, bypassing more traditionally American options. It was presumably a favor to the IOC, which clearly wants more sports like cricket with massive existing international fanbases to draw eyes to the Olympics. But now I’m wondering whether Team USA can find their way to the podium.

What’s next for Pakistan?

Revenge. They should abandon cricket and focus all their attention on the 2026 World Baseball Classic. Even though Team Pakistan was outscored 43-4 in their attempts to qualify for the 2019 and 2023 editions of the WBC, they’re significantly more motivated to take down Team USA now.