I'm so glad to see another recognition by the esteemed paper like NYtimes and the organization like NYPD, and I'm sure that'll give a great boost to professional cricket in the region. When european teams can emerge as the threatening teams to world cricket, why not North American teams as I'm sure they possess a great deal of potential gathered from all around the world.
Here is an event of Cricket in the region covered boldly by NYtimes in its sports edition:
With Every Whack of the Cricket Bat, a Bond
Ruby Washington/The New York Times
The KnightRiders celebrate at last week’s season opener.
By SIMON AKAM
Published: June 28, 2009
The Gateway
Cricket Ground in Brooklyn is a spartan place — a grass oval tucked in by the Belt Parkway, in the shadows of the towers of Starrett City and beneath the flight path of
Kennedy International Airport.
Ruby Washington/The New York Times
Poised for the pitch in a Police Department cricket league match at Spring Creek Park in Brooklyn. The league has grown this year.
But on Tuesday morning it was crowded with players, some toting paddlelike bats, and filled with the sound of leather balls struck by wood.
The sport they were playing is as ancient as it is baffling to most Americans, yet the New York Police Department has chosen cricket as a way to foster relationships with newer immigrant communities.
The Police Department established a
cricket competition for young men in the city last summer; the project was a success, and on Tuesday, play began for another season. Interest has expanded, with 10 teams and 170 players involved this year, compared with 6 teams last year.
“This is the most diverse city in the world,” said Police Commissioner
Raymond W. Kelly. “We don’t have uniform relationships with all communities. This opens the door, allows us to interact with them on the sport field.”
The police have long organized athletic programs as a way to keep teenagers out of mischief, especially in the summer, when schools are closed, days are long and it is easy to get into trouble.
Last year, a soccer competition aimed at immigrants in the city was popular with Eastern Europeans and some Latinos, but the police believed they needed to make inroads with other groups.
“The Muslim community is not a community we had great outreach to in the past,” said Deputy Inspector Amin Kosseim, who runs special projects for the department’s Community Affairs Bureau.
And so the police decided to experiment with cricket, a game with a huge following across the Caribbean and South Asia. The response has cut across community lines. Tuesday’s opening match pitted the SuperStars — made up largely of players from Guyana — against the KnightRiders, a predominantly Pakistani team.
At a recent training session in Baisley Pond Park in Springfield Gardens, Queens, some of the players expressed enthusiasm and gratitude for the chance to play cricket.
“It shows the police are interested in bringing the youths away from street life,” said Azurdeen Mohammed, 18, the SuperStars team captain. “My guys, when they see the cops, they know they help us out.”
On the season’s opening day last week, Khawar Abbas, 15, a KnightRiders player, also said that cricket had changed the way he thought about the police.
“They are more into community than I thought they were,” he said. “They actually care about different types of people.”
A cricket match can last as long as five days and still end in a tie. However, the Police Department has adopted a shorter form of the game, called Twenty20 — in this form, a match lasts around three hours. The shorter form encourages big, crowd-pleasing hitting.
Twenty20 cricket has a serious international following, but John L. Aaron, the executive secretary of the
USA Cricket Association, believes this abbreviated form is particularly suited to the mind-set on this side of the Atlantic.
“The sports psyche of the average American is: get home from work, see a game and get the kids to school in the morning,” he said.
The police have also had to make other adaptations to cricket to fit New York conditions. For example, a strip of rolled and immaculately trimmed grass is normally used as the playing surface on which a ball bounces before it is struck by a batsman. But that strip is expensive and rare in this country. So the league’s matches, played at Spring Creek Park in Brooklyn and Kissena Park in Queens, use a substitute: a heavy, fibrous mat that is staked to the ground before a game.
At a SuperStars training session recently in Baisley Pond Park, youngsters on a neighboring basketball court looked on askance as the team carried the mat from a metal locker and used mallets to secure it to the damp earth. The bounce, according to the team’s coach, Ajaz Asgarally, was satisfactory.
It remains to be seen if the Police Department is able to nurture cricket talent in the way that other law enforcement agencies have. According to Keith A. P. Sandiford, a professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba who has written extensively on cricket, a police boys club established in Barbados to keep wayward boys off the streets once showcased the talents of a young
Garfield Sobers.
Mr. Sobers later went on to become captain of the West Indies national team and is widely regarded as one of the game’s finest players.
Karen Zraick contributed reporting.
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