The Sport That Asks Nothing of Us

It was still cold at 7 am, but it would later turn into that one perfect late April Saturday. I got off the 1 train above ground at 242nd Street, to a steady hum of activity on the grass below. It was a quiet and sustained movement of bodies, set against the quiet of a day only just beginning. The Parade Ground of Van Cortlandt Park is a low, sunken field off Broadway. I descended to the spotty grass, where an occasional appreciative shout of “Baaaa-aall!” emitted from the various cricket games underway on the field.

The matches had just begun, each in a playing oval delineated by a ring of plastic cones. The fields were organized at a right angle: five parallel games and two more set off to the side. At the center of each field was a pitch — a long jute mat nailed to the dirt. From the street, this spatial logic was apparent, impressive even, but the closer I got, the harder it was to tell if I was traversing playing, or spectating territory. Neither the improvisation nor my own uncertainties seemed to deter the players: 13 on the field and nine more grouped around the boundary line were all studiously following their team’s game. This was the first day of the Cricket Clubs of Westchester’s T10 Premier League, and teams were paired off for the first two games of the season.

Nobody gave me a second glance. It was assumed, I think, that amongst the mass of brown bodies that absorbed me, I was someone else’s daughter, partner, sister. A tacit question surfaced with increasing frequency: “What are we even doing here, so far away from home?” Despite my deep feeling of outsideness to this world, an improvised belonging naturally explained away my presence. This was familiarity born of a civil carelessness: the match on pitch number eight was not being performed for me, and its participants remained inattentive to their sole spectator.

To say I grew up watching cricket would be a major exaggeration. It was there, always, as it pervades any life in Mumbai. I knew its contours without ever stepping inside of it: the highlighter green grass on a TV, the cadences of a radio commentary in a language I had too poor a grasp on to follow a whole game. Cricket permeated most things — the street, the billboards, the seasons, the birthday parties — and so made itself impossible to not know. By contrast, I have found that in New York, cricket exists with quiet privacy and clean self-assuredness. It is not marred by paraphernalia. That day in the park, I was forced to confront the game, rather than all of its accoutrements and spillages. This version of the sport — unlike the larger-than-life Mumbai counterpart — is not trying to get bigger, more organized, or even to accrue an audience at all. The amateur, motley group of players seem only mildly interested in improvement, and in each other.  They are just trying to be at home. And so, I think, am I.

It was my first time in Van Cortlandt Park, which stretches 1,000 acres beginning at the northern fringes of the Bronx. The wide expanse of the Parade Ground — accessible by car or train, easily reserved online, and relatively large and flat — is a favored cricket playing field for the amateur leagues of New York and New Jersey. Every summer weekend, it is here that players descend from Westchester to the north, the five boroughs to the south, and New Jersey to the west. But the grounds weren’t always recreational. In 1639, the Dutch West India Company purchased this land from the Wiechquaeskeck tribe of the Lenape people, who used it as a planting field and a burial ground. After it was bought by the Van Cortlandts in 1699, it served as the family plantation, where farm animals roamed and rye, wheat, and corn filled the fields. In 1888, the City bought the plantation and the fields gave way to a flat Parade Ground, used as a training facility for the National Guard. Several afterlives on, it is a recreational ground, its histories buried beneath layers of soil underfoot. And so, every summer weekend morning, against the backdrop of horse-chestnut trees and the Horace Mann School, are crisp knocks of a wooden bat against bright red ball. The shared descendants of the Commonwealth gather on yet another contested ground that was, for much of the Revolutionary War, held by the British.

I sat on the grass off to the side to watch them play. “They’re cheaters,” I hear. It was dismissive and defensive, but a sign of being truly in the game. The stakes could not be lower, but the spirit rivaled any professional gameplay. Scorekeeping, I soon realized, was an endlessly negotiated aspect of these morning games with each team keeping their own version, which they checked against each other every few overs. The scores never matched, and yet despite this the game never stopped. “They’re cheating.” It was unclear whose side the umpire (paid between $70 and $100 for the match, split evenly between 22 players) was on. “What’s Saketh’s password?” the newest scorekeeper would ask. Saketh was on the other end of the field. Sriram Uncle shrugged, “As if my son would tell me his password,” without taking his eyes off the ball.

Sid and Saketh Anand established the Yorktown Titans when the pandemic left them with few other excuses to be outdoors and keep talking cricket to folks other than each other in a quiet Westchester suburb. They had returned from Bangalore only a few years before, following a circuitous childhood dictated mostly by their father, Sriram Uncle’s job. Bangalore is where they learned to play and watch cricket, to find fluency in its vocabulary and its cadence. The return to Westchester and the start of high school meant that cricket slowly receded to the background of their suburban lives and shared determination toward achieving Americanness. In 2020, something changed. They began playing again with some high school friends and their dads in the town baseball field, a ground they found most closely approximated the bounce afforded a red season ball on a clay cricket pitch. The Anand brothers discovered that there were already some amateur cricket teams in Westchester, all loosely formed around the town’s India Center. “The Kerala Giant Strikers are entirely Malayali, they all go to church together,” Sid informed me, referring to another team playing on a neighboring pitch, where the South Indian team was preparing for the next inning. The geo-cultural alliances that were so familiar at home extended all the way to Westchester: a South Indian church team, a Bangalore-Mumbai-New York tech pipeline contingent, a team made up entirely of those who ran cultural programming at the India Center.  The motley Yorktown Titans, made up of Westchester Indian Americans and various college friends now working in the city, were soon initiated into the Cricket Clubs of Westchester T10 Premier League, and members found themselves carpooling to the Bronx.

On the field, it seemed that nobody was in charge, but somehow everyone knew their place. My varied attempts at conversation were quickly and politely declined. Everyone was here to play or talk about the last match they livestreamed on Willow TV.  The depth and precision with which team members described each other’s personas on the field stood in stark contrast to how little they spoke about each other’s lives outside the sport: a video of a baby daughter, an offhand comment on the latest tariffs. Sid recalled every one of Chandra’s match-winning innings of the last season but wasn’t quite sure what he did for work.

The Cricket Clubs of Westchester are part of a long, albeit sequestered lineage of sport on these lands. The world’s first international cricket game was hosted in Manhattan in 1844. The three-day affair was played between the United States of America and the British Empire’s Canadian Provinces. This was nearly 50 years before the Van Cortlandts sold their plantation to the City, back when the privately owned St. George’s Cricket Club at West 30th Street and Broadway was the prime place to play cricket in the city. The year 1844 was before India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh existed as established nations. Today, it is this trifecta on the other side of the globe that dominates the sport.

Yet less than one percent of American residents play, or otherwise actively engage with cricket today. The sport pales in comparison to the universes and deep pockets of professional baseball and basketball. But for those that do play, the pitches at Van Cortlandt Park— despite never having hosted an international game — resolutely remain the nation’s cricket epicenter. “I’ve seen Steve Bucknor umpire here,” I was told in revered tones. This was holy ground, if you cared to stay long enough.

“Can you even imagine,” said Sriram Uncle, gesturing toward the expansive Parade Ground field. “All of this would have just disappeared.” He was referring to New York City’s bid to host the 2024 Cricket World Cup at Van Cortlandt Park. In 2022, Eric Adams’ administration developed a proposal to create a modular cricket pitch to seat 34,000 spectators where I now stood with Sriram Uncle and his team. The five days of gameplay, the administration claimed, would bring in $150 million of economic activity to the city.

This plan for a private takeover of the land for a whole playing season faced significant opposition from the amateur cricketers. Where would they play? Would the park ever be returned to its original condition? Their love for the sport did not extend to fantasies of New York’s ascension to a global cricketing capital. Why spend $20 million to make Van Cortlandt Park a cricketing outpost when it already is one, for free?

Combined resistance from the amateur leagues and the Van Cortlandt Park Alliance succeeded in the City’s eventual withdrawal of the bid (it was awarded to Eisenhower Park in Nassau County, Long Island). The opposition framed an argument on the grounds of infringement of the Public Trust Doctrine (PTD), a principle originating from English common law that establishes the park as a natural and cultural resource that must be preserved for public use. To allow the private International Cricket Commission to take over the park for six months would violate the PTD, which applies to all New York State parkland. In this instance, even the glamor of international championship play had little appeal for the 100-odd New Yorkers that only wanted sporty summer weekends and a place to feel like home, even if just for a few hours.

Cricket is a slow game, designed more for players than spectators. Its rules have barely changed since the 19th century. Like most sports, it is held together by a suspension of any interrogations of purpose. A question as vast and unwieldy as “What’s the point?” simply has no place in the procedures that regulate this universe. It is a game that is disinterested in beating time, especially in this amateur iteration, which occurs entirely for pleasure. Twenty-over games last the length of a good morning, or a slow afternoon. In contrast, the languid test match so relished by the traditionalist draws out over a full weekend, with a lunch break at the peak of noon’s unbearable heat.

Each moment is savored: the slow lead-in to bowling a leg spin, the measured arc of a ball crossing a boundary, an umpire ambling away from the pitch for a cigarette and a piss. By all accounts, this is a game that insists on taking as long as it needs. We are occupying a different space now, distant from the onslaught of images and three-second videos of a superlative life. Rather, every act happens in real time: the fastball, the clean taking of a wicket, six smooth runs in a single ball. Every unit is a discrete arc that begins and ends with the red ball back in the bowler’s palm, rubbed clean from what it has just endured. During a match, the only place one can occupy is deep in the match. So I was quiet, and I watched.

This sport, a wholly inoffensive and insular pursuit, does not ask anything of us. Its purveyors do not even ask for us to watch or pay attention. This morning’s game closed at 10:45 am. The scores were uploaded to the League website. The players gathered the yellow plastic cones that mark the boundaries of the field. The jute mat was dusted and rolled up. The shared bats exchanged enough hands to eventually make their way back to their owners. Trash was collected, and the equipment was placed in the rented locker nearby. Cricketers headed down to Manhattan on the 1, or back up to Westchester in their cars. As the day turned, the field was peopled by other New Yorkers — runners, dog walkers, picnickers, a soccer team.