The game of cricket, a contest of patience and athleticism born in Great Britain and barely understood by most Americans, has surprisingly caught on in the land of Friday Night Football. A growing number of South Asian immigrants living in Houston and Dallas have brought their beloved sport back home, where it has developed against the backdrop of a Lone Star culture that suggests rivalry in everything, especially sports.
The rapid growth of cricket in Houston has attracted international attention and helped Texas become the launching pad for the first American professional cricket league, Major League Cricket, whose inaugural season began Thursday in Dallas.
One of the unknown things about Houston is the diversity of the population from many countries playing cricket, said Tim Cork, deputy consul general at the British consulate in Houston. There are Indians, Pakistanis, obviously a huge number of Brits, Australian accents all over the place.
According to the Census Bureau’s annual study, the number of people of Indian descent in Texas has doubled in the past decade to half a million, including 73,000 in Harris County, which includes Houston, and 64,000 in suburban Fort Bend County.
When I came to this country, the only sport I knew was cricket, said Fort Bend County Judge K.P. George, who immigrated to the U.S. from India in 1993. When he was elected to the m, and coaches young cricketers in Houston. He watched his team play at the start of the match, which will last about five hours, and chatted about cricket and careers with the players, who were seated in the stands under a small canopy.
Which of the boys is going to study artificial intelligence? — He asked.
I’m studying computer science, one of the players replied.
I thought you were going to be a doctor, replied Knowsher.
When 17-year-old team captain Arya Kannanta was waiting for his turn to bat, he said he was in the state, Pero said. He was overwhelmed, and he loved it.
Jain, who grew up and played cricket in Chennai, India, and now lives in Dallas, called for investment in the nascent American professional league, citing the sport’s huge international popularity and the large number of fans in Texas. They will tell you that food is the way to a man’s heart, Jain said. Cricket is the way to a South Asian man’s heart. It’s not just a sport, it’s a way of life.
The emergence of cricket has given hope to some leaders in the city of Prairie View, home to the historically black Prairie View A&M State University, that the tournaments will be a source of revenue for the cash-strapped city, even though it has few cricket fans and few South Asians.
Our position is to help them, help them grow, said Kendrick Jones, a county commissioner and alumnus of the u