HOUSTON – In further evidence of the polyglot melting pot that this metropolis has become, today it is possible to zigzag from one cricket field to another, from another to another until you are almost dizzy.
“They’re popping up everywhere, left and right,” said Tayyab Naqi, a 22-year-old University of Houston student who plays in a league and whose family immigrated 18 years ago from Lahore, Pakistan.
“On the fields we have now, you can play every weekend, and there is still more to come,” said Kishore Bandlamuri, 33, in Houston since 2018 after growing up in the Indian giant of Hyderabad and also in a league .
Told over coffee that a visitor had mapped out 22 plots of land around the giant city, Houston restaurant magnate, philanthropist and cricket pitch financier Tanweer Ahmed responded: “Now there are actually more. Now I’m over thirty.”
All together, if they are spread out, they talk about the world’s second-largest sport having a nascent period in the United States just as the T20 Cricket World Cup begins Saturday alongside Dallas before continuing into June in the Caribbean and the USA.
Far east of downtown Houston, in Baytown, they’re playing on the grass between a soccer field and four baseball diamonds in front of a water park with occasional squeaks from the surf slide. An hour west, on the other side of the expanse, in a Stafford city park, just beyond six basketball courts occupied in a tidy pavilion, there is a cricket tournament with a table full of trophies awaiting their various shelves, plus the always welcome fact that someone has brought a large drum.
On the cricket hunting map you will find world-class, manicured fields and simple, neglected fields. Sakhi Muhammad, who built Moosa Cricket Stadium in Pearland a decade ago while those around him wondered about its balance, notes that more than 50 teams in greater Houston are “playing with the hard ball,” as used in top competitions. , and more than 100 “play soft-ball cricket,” using a rubber or tennis ball wrapped in duct tape. Waleed Zaman, a 22-year-old whose family emigrated 12 years ago from Peshawar, Pakistan, said: “The “Growth has been immense because when I first started getting interested in (playing) cricket, there were a lot fewer teams than Houston has now.”
It now points out six leagues, one premier and five amateurs, in addition to other “Saturday leagues” in which players can show their skills.
There’s also this: “In Houston,” Naqi said, “there’s a lot of cricket in the parking lots.”
Cricket hasn’t affected King American Football or taken attention away from the Astros, and it’s easy to live in a big city without realizing it. But as South Asian immigrants have arrived in increasing numbers and helped fuel Houston’s dazzling diversity, cricket fields have added to the tapestry.
They are right on the boulevards and side streets, near convenience stores with gas pumps or farms with horses standing in the heat or a towing company called “All-America” or a bakery with delicacies from the Indian state of Kerala or billboards. electoral candidates or charter schools, churches, used car sales. Or they are in the middle of farmland in Wallis, far west of the city, where six lampposts rise along two-lane roads and occasional houses, and those who play there speak of occasional fog and dew that add up to to the voluminous nuances of cricket.
Along a quick stretch of a busy highway in Sugar Land that screams the variety of the region, there is an Islamic center, a “Christian Church,” a Buddhist temple, an Assembly of God Church called Firebrand, and then, hidden behind a stone condominium complex, a beautiful cricket field.
In a park well northwest of downtown Houston, an attractive marker screams a little cosmopolitanism. You are ready to track runs, overs and wickets.
About 53, sometimes slow, miles northwest of the city, the Prairie View Cricket Complex with its six fields hosted intellectual matches last weekend between the United States and Bangladesh. In April it held a women’s tournament. In March it held a 26-team university tournament. It seats 10,000 people and has a grass surface, which is expensive to maintain but gives Ahmed “a bit of pride” due to its standard. As Naqi said, it’s “a proper setup” where “you can see the ball behave differently.”
The field and the international matches played on it and the T20 World Cup in the United States add up to “a dream come true, to be honest,” said Ahmed, a Houston resident since 2007 and based in the United States since 1988 with a Herculean history. of his life went from childhood poverty in a village near Sialkot, Pakistan, to one of his many peaks in 2018, when he bought the first 14 acres of land. “I never thought he would go this far. “It all started literally trying to play myself and then all of a sudden I decided to buy more and more land.”
Back in town and south of its center in Pearland, Muhammad’s Moosa Stadium features a referee’s lounge, commentary box, media center, VIP box and more.
“Most of my community and business people told me, ‘Look, you’re doing something that’s not going to happen,’” said Muhammad, a Houston resident since 1996 and a native of Karachi, Pakistan. “’Cricket isn’t going anywhere.’ And then: “They called me crazy 10 years ago.” And now, “Sometimes not all dreams come true, but this is one that did come true.” He notes that Moosa held 12 one-day internationals in 2022 alone.
At Babar Noor’s high school, the other kids know that he and another student are cricket players, but they may seem confused about what exactly that means. On a recent Sunday, Noor carpooled from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. with four fellow players from Clear Lake, south-southeast of downtown Houston, to Katy, northwest. “I feel lucky,” he said about participating, the World Cup and all that.
“I wish there was a high school team, but that’s fine,” said Noor, 17, born in Houston to parents from Karachi. “It’s the only thing I wish existed.”
In fact, a feeling of pleasant surprise prevails among many of the players in Sunday’s game at the Katy field.
“Basically, when I came (to the United States 12 years ago), my thought was, ‘Will I play cricket? Is it as common as it was in India? said Nadir Husain, 35, a native of Hyderabad, who emigrated at 23 to pursue his master’s degree. “To my surprise, my university (Houston Clear Lake) had a cricket team that competed at the regional and national level.”
The meaning of simply landing here has changed in terms of cricket.
“People who moved here 30 or 40 years ago wouldn’t have expected this to happen in the United States,” said Pradeep Dasu, 24, also from Hyderabad, who has been here for three years. He now sees “every country” with “their own set of players playing in Houston,” referring especially to Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans.
Sairam Mandhadi, 31, from Hyderabad and in the United States for the past 18 months, said he found more cricket available to everyday players in Houston than in India. “I feel truly blessed to be a part of Houston,” he said. In fact, he stopped playing around age 22 and then moved to a neighborhood near the Texans’ NRG Stadium, where many Indian students reside.
“That’s where I got the push again,” he said. “That is the main reason to love this city. And I feel like I’m not going anywhere else! Trust me.”
It has taken him to an unexpected cricket wonderland alongside his IT career, which often means obsessing during the week whether he comes out with one, two or a few balls in a match and chatting about cricket while at social functions, At this point, his wife sometimes asks him if she can move on to other topics.
“Believe me, even my family members get very bored when we get together, because all the kids will be talking about cricket,” he said.
So they are meeting. “It’s about being together,” Bandlamuri said, “and it’s about being together with the other team as well,” often with nationalities they wouldn’t have met except in this melting pot.
And they are examining the conditions. “The grass wasn’t mowed on Sunday because we just had a storm,” said Naimesh Patel, 42, in Houston since 2014 and a former U.S. military officer. “So that was impeding the ball. The second thing was that there was a crosswind for the last half hour, so I was able to take advantage of that to bowl.”
And they feel very deep feelings like nostalgia. “It’s a game where you forget about everything external because you are so focused on the game,” Husain said. “Those two or three hours are just for the game, and then you come back to reality.”
Then, in the coming weeks, everyone will focus on the latest World Cup in T20, the fastest and newest of the three main forms of cricket, designed to capture limited attention spans with its roughly three-hour matches. Texas A&M student Samad Alnawaz, 21, born in Galveston to parents from Karachi, will go with friends to Grand Prairie, next to Dallas, for the June 6 game between the United States and Pakistan. “I’m not going to miss the opportunity to see Pakistan for the first time,” said the lifelong American.
There is a well thought out plan. They will drive to Dallas-Fort Worth the night before. They will sleep a little. Then, as close to dawn as possible, they will arrive at the stadium, located next to the Lone Star racetrack and on its walls display banners of the six teams of the United States Major League Cricket. They don’t want to miss warm-ups.
“Going out and seeing what they do before the game is just as fun as the game itself,” said Alnawaz, who imagines being there “maybe for eight hours straight.”
Soon after, in a faraway place, Long Island, comes another big game.
“Imagine June 9 when Pakistan plays India,” Ahmed said. “I guarantee you that 1.5 billion people will see it around the world. Who would have thought in 2016 that in 2024 we would host international games here? Is incredible. “It’s a very good feeling.”
Keynote USA
For the Latest Local News, Follow Keynote USA Local on Twitter.