New York — One of the great diversions in cricket’s centuries of strange turns is seeing a World Cup being played in New York and as one of eight venues. It is a tremendous, headline-grabbing notion. As with most realities, it is a little different.
For a start the eight scheduled games are actually being played in sleepy Long Island, almost 80km outside the city in a purpose built, pop-up stadium with a capacity of almost 35,000, more than the Wanderers and Lord’s.
The Americans can build such an extraordinary structure, from scratch, in just three months, but some things in cricket just can’t be rushed, like the preparation of a good pitch which provides an even contest between bat and ball.
The drop-in one used for SA’s match against Sri Lanka on Monday was also curated over the course of just three months and had never had a ball bowled on it. Cricket pitches take time to calm down and “settle”. Sri Lanka’s batsmen might as well have been facing a golf ball on tarmac and were duly blown away for an embarrassing total of just 76.
If the cricket was embarrassing inside the stadium, the security arrangements outside were excruciating in their severity and completely chaotic in their implementation. The NYPD were out in force and supplemented by battalions of troops in full combat fatigues with automatic, military weapons.
The entire Eisenhower Park in which the stadium is situated, comprising hundreds of hectares, was shut down and sealed off. Spectators were forced to walk for more than 30 minutes to reach the venue with armed police or troops surveying them every 50m or so.
Six countries, two continents and match starting times varying by as much as 10 hours with venues as diverse as Guyana in South America to Trinidad, Barbados, Dallas and New York, this is truly something else.
The tournament’s apparent randomness and chaos is pulled together by the maximisation of revenue from the Indian television market. Games starting at 10.30am or 7pm in the US capture the prime market times, never mind what that means for those “on the ground”.
Playing T20 cricket at 10.30am is a bit like having a beer at that time of day. You can do it, if you have to, but you’d rather not and, if you do fancy it, there’s likely a problem.
The fact that the tournament’s sporting integrity is fundamentally compromised is not even a debate. When the ICC announced its schedule of warm-up matches, including India vs SA in Florida, the BCCI simply said no and “requested” a different warm-up match in New York. Which was delivered to them, against Bangladesh. India is also the only team with its semifinal venue confirmed before the tournament, if they reach the last four.
It is what it is, and the rest of the teams simply have to get on with doing their best to disrupt what feels like a “script” for India’s success. On Monday, SA did that in emphatic fashion in the friendliest fast bowling conditions many will ever have experienced.
Anrich Nortjé looked like a school ground bully with his 150km/h bouncers earning him 4-0-7-4 while Kagiso Rabada (2/21) and Ottniel Baartman (4-1-9-1) were no less awkward to handle.
The Proteas also play Bangladesh and the Netherlands at this venue in the next week and they are highly unlikely to fare any better against the SA pace attack — and the pitch certainly isn’t going to get any flatter. After that comes the Super Eight round and, all being well, a semifinal against India in Guyana or somebody else in Trinidad.
The cricket, however, is entirely secondary to the ICC behind maximising revenue. And certainly secondary to the American hosts behind throwing as much manpower, might and weaponry at protecting the players in a sport very few of them know anything about.
In just three months time this stadium will have popped back down again and Eisenhower Park returned to tranquil normality with the T20 World Cup nothing more than a distant, hazy memory.
The ICC is determined to “crack” the American market. Unfortunately, many locals have been even further alienated from an already strange game by the brutal heavy-handedness of the security operation which New York journalists have described as the “biggest ever for a sporting event, bigger even than the Super Bowl”.
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