Promoting cricket… in America?

A conversation with Jalal-ud-Din, record-holder for the world’s first one-day international ‘hat-trick’, and how curiosity, opportunity, and a new generation are boosting cricket across the U.S.A. 

 It was a typically hot September day in 1982 in Hyderabad, Pakistan. The Niaz Stadium was agog with excitement as the country’s cricket team was playing against their Australian counterparts in the first of a series of three one-day international (ODI) matches. 

Pakistan had batted first and scored 229 runs, losing six wickets in the allotted 40 overs. Australian openers Brian Laird and Graham Wood gave their team a strong start scoring more than 100 runs in partnership. However, soon enough, a 23-year old named Jalal-ud-Din had caught out Wood, bowled by Tauseef Ahmad and that began a steady collapse with the Jalal-ud-Din bowling, claiming the prized wicket of Allan Border as his first. 

For the young pacer who had made his international cricket debut barely six months earlier, for Jalal-ud-Din to take Border’s wicket was an impressive feat given Border’s formidable reputation as a batsman (They were called batsmen then. Now the gender-neutral term is batters).  

A historic hat-trick 

But for Jalal-ud-Din something more historic was in store. 

Next, he clean bowled the wicket-keeper Rodney Marsh. And in the very next ball, he had Bruce Yardly caught behind. By that second wicket, Jalal-ud-Din was on the cusp of a hat-trick – taking three wickets, getting three batsmen out consecutively.  

The third ball from Jalal-ud-Din whizzed past Geoff Lawson’s bat and uprooted the stumps.  

Leaping in the air, exulting over his three wickets, Jalal-ud-Din did not know then that this was the first instance of a hat-trick in ODI history. 

As Jalal-ud-Din looks back at that performance nearly four- and-a- half decades ago, he breaks into a gentle smile. “When you take the first wicket you cannot think that you are going to do a hat-trick,” he says, talking to Sapan News over a video call from Karachi where he is currently training local talent.  

When Jalal-ud-Din claimed the second wicket on the second ball with the wicket keeper Wasim Bari catching a nick from Yardly, there was some anticipation in his mind about what could be. “After the second wicket, excitement built up,” he says. 

“Normally, I used to bowl outswing, but the next ball came in quickly and kept low,” he says. That beat Lawson’s bat. 

Jalal-ud-Din says when a bowler is on a hat-trick the captain of the team would normally set an attacking field, but Zaheer Abbas did not. Abbas, the Pakistan captain, kept a normal field.  

“I felt that there should have been more effort since I was on a hat-trick. But it was a combination of my effort and luck that paid off,” he says. 

He also remembers without any overt dismay that he was more excited at his hat-trick than his teammates seemed to be. No one seemed particularly excited. It was only later that they learnt that Jalal-ud-Din had taken the first hat-trick in ODI history. 

Since retiring, and particularly in the last 20 years Jalal-ud-Din has gone on to become a Level IV qualified cricket coach training both young boys and girls across the United States as well as in Pakistan. He runs the Smart Choice National Cricket Academy (SCNCA), training facility in Houston, Texas, while also traveling frequently to Pakistan to impart training there. Apart from aspiring cricketers, Jalal-ud-Din also trains coaches. 

His freelance coaching assignments have taken him to Seattle, Michigan, and Dallas among other cities across the U.S. He began small soon after 2020 when he was appointed a selector for the southwest zone, one of the six cricket zones in America. 

Cricket in America? 

Over the years he has noticed an uptick in the interest in the game not just as a sport but even as a potential career. 

Overall, he is optimistic about the future of cricket in America. A caveat is that several factors need to converge before the sport can gain any kind of popularity comparable to football and basketball. 

One challenge is lack of infrastructure. Another is that U.S. Cricket, the organizing body under the International Cricket Council (ICC), does not have enough funds. That means cricket at the grassroots level is not well organized. There is no regular domestic cricket. The U.S. team invites a group of 20-25 players, conducts a camp and then makes a selection, he told Sapan News. 

Jalal-ud-Din points out that the selection is not made based on performance in domestic cricket, unlike the major cricket-playing countries which have thriving domestic cricket leagues and matches which take place throughout the year. 

Another factor which weighs down the growth of the sport in America is that it is expatriate players from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh who play much of the cricket here. 

Ironically, Pakistan and India today barely even have cricketing ties.

The fact that mainstream Americans do not participate in almost any number is a greatly inhibiting factor, says Jalal-ud-Din.

“Also, there is no cricket in schools. That is also a problem,” he adds. In his analysis, unless cricket becomes part of school sports which children of non-Southasian backgrounds also pursue, it is unlikely to become a nationally followed game.  

“When they have cricket in schools as well as proper domestic cricket season, they will see growth,” he says. 

Jalal-ud-Din is particularly looking forward to how the inclusion of the sport in the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics will boost its popularity among Americans. 

“From what I understand, the U.S. government spends money only on those sports which are part of the Olympics. If after the LA Olympics, the government spends on infrastructure, it will have a positive effect,” he says. 

In terms of which form of cricket will work well in the U.S., he suggests to begin with, it will have to be the T20 format the duration of which is similar to other major sports such as football and basketball. Test cricket, which lasts five days and which is the core of all serious cricket-playing countries, may have few takers in America. He does not not see any prospect for that format in the near future. 

He says that efforts are underway to get U.S. cricket to qualify for Test cricket by 2030. “When you become a Test playing country, you get funds. What the ICC gives U.S. Cricket is for the development of the game. Those funds are not enough to manage a country as big as the U.S. A major chunk of the current funds goes toward paying salaries of foreigners who are part of that system,” he says. 

The big picture, he believes, is to create high visibility for cricket which young Americans can watch and get inspired by. If all these factors are managed well, there is no better place to promote cricket than in America, he believes.  

This country has a long history of scaling sports to very high levels of success from the standpoint of not just the sports themselves but also their commercial value and viewership. 

Mayank Chhaya is a Chicago-based journalist and writer. He is also a painter. Email: mcsix@outlook.com. 

This is a Sapan News syndicated feature available for republication with due credit https://www.sapannews.com.

*Why ‘Southasia’ as one word? Because our histories entangle, our struggles intersect, and our futures are bound together.

This article was written and edited by humans. Click here for our separate news AI policy.

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