The ICC’s newly minted expansion plan for cricket was to bring the fast and furious version (aka T20) to what is considered the biggest sports market in the world. Team USA may not be making the right noise off their bats, but it’s the unwitting fans and their banter on how cricket is a mere off-shoot of baseball that has caught us wide of mark

Cricket or baseball (Credit: Freepik)

New Delhi: The chicken or the egg causality dilemma which is commonly asked as – “which came first: the chicken or the egg?” has found an equivalent in the Baseball-Cricket discourse – is cricket an off-shoot of Baseball or is the former the OG bat-ball game that is prevalent today. While there is no scientific evidence that definitively answers the egg-chicken quandary, there is enough empirical evidence that suggests cricket was indeed the original game of bat and ball. So, when Americans busy themselves with this concern, while watching the T20 World Cup unfolding in their backyards, you can safely tell them this – Cricket’s the real deal, homie!

Yes, America, is alien to cricket. Yes, the nation is one of the greatest market for sports. Yes, there is a bursting Indian diaspora from Jersey, Maryland, New York who would do anything to watch a match of cricket being played in their side of the country. So, when the International Cricket Council decided to woo this continent as a joint host of the T20 version of cricket, the decision should have been met with praise instead of derision.

The latter because American citizens refuse to budge from their antediluvian stance of equating baseball with cricket and even going a step further in saying that cricket is an off-shoot of the American baseball. While the similarities between the two games exist (albeit distinctly), it is a very conventional notion that baseball was a lazy form of cricket. So, why do Americans insist on a contrarian view?

We selected this answer from the many available on Reddit – A user has summarised his POV as such “There are two reasons that come to mind. First, the Americans suffer from the instinct to have first stake at everything and every sport. It is a part of their urge to be a superpower in all aspects of life and living. Second, citizens of the US don’t understand the new rules associated with the game of cricket, their national team is nowhere near comparison to any A level team playing the sport. Because they cannot excel in the sport, it’s obvious that they would deny its popularity.”

There is no correct answer to this hypothetical question as to why Americans deny cricket as the parent game but we do have some research material that suggests why the confusion exists in the minds.

Americanisation and cricket: Will the twain meet?

While cricket became a longer and more leisurely game as batsmen began to dominate the sport, and wanted more time to display their individual skills, baseball, became shorter and more abbreviated. However, all similarities and dissimilarities were pushed into a pause button as America went through rampant transformation.

Americanisation has limited the interest in sports to just super bowl, baseball, basketball and tennis on the periphery. So much so that even when they enjoy a game of cricket — the USA-India match held on June 12 drew a massive crowd of both American and Indian origin — there is a set of people who find themselves sceptical about the game, about how it is played and also about what their allegiance should be.

One person even queried on Nation TV; Is cricket not akin to Baseball? Didn’t it originate from there? Someone should remind the Americans that cricket came into the Americas through Brit plantation owners in the 1700s, a game played in whites as relief from hectic work activity.

It is widely believed that baseball developed out of an early form of cricket called “rounders”.

Rounders, cricket and baseball – the awesome threesome

According to sports gurus, it was cricket that was the first and original choice of sport for the English gentry that had settled in the Boston coast. ‘Rounders’, a more crude form of cricket, and something that resembled baseball, was also prevalent among the Irish youth during the same time. The Boston cricketers of the time encouraged rounders only as a secondary diversion, and even allowed it to be played in their cricket fields by those who preferred an alternative to the more formal sport of cricket.

Early baseball grew in the US under cricket’s umbrella. It stayed that way for about the first hundred years of its existence. Although the games looked a lot like each other, it was only after 1850 that the two games drifted apart. Cricket and baseball then assumed their own character and identity.

As we progressed into the 1900s, cricket and baseball started looking far different from each other. Unfortunately, for sporting fans (like us), by that time it had become a choice between cricket OR baseball in the USA.

This was no googly, because everyone knows which way it swung.