The Spin | ‘Land of opportunity’: USA is cricket’s

In the first of a series of special features, we look at how a sport buried by the American civil war is undergoing a revival

Manhattan’s skyscrapers are built on cricket fields. There was one under Pier 17 at the Seaport on the East River, another beneath the North Meadow of Central Park, and a third right on 1st Avenue and East 32nd St, below the car park of NYU’s Langone Medical Center.

In 1844, a crowd of about 5,000 New Yorkers watched the first international match there, between the USA and Canada. “Cricket was the first modern team sport in America,” says Chuck Ramkissoon, in Joseph O’Neill’s great New York novel Netherland, “a bona fide American pastime”. He’s right. It was, once.