Home runs: The growing Australia-USA cricket crossover

At a former baseball stadium in Dallas earlier this week, Australia's greatest male bowler and batter of their generation went head-to-head for the second time in four days.

What shaped as a pair of captivating duels between Pat Cummins and Steve Smith hardly rated a mention in their home country as the Smith-captained Washington Freedom trumped Cummins' San Fransisco Unicorns in the Major League Cricket (MLC) finals.

Despite Smith's match-winning hand of 88 off 52 balls in the tournament decider at the same Grand Prairie ground that hosted the T20 World Cup opener in June, Cummins maintained a little-known hold over his Test vice-captain in both the decider and a preceding qualifying final.

In the four T20 matches in which Smith has faced up to his long-time teammate, Cummins has dismissed him each time. Their head-to-head record stands at 4 wickets for 8 runs from 13 balls across their four encounters in the IPL, and now the MLC.

It's a fact few fans down under will be aware of (nor seemingly was San Fransisco skipper Corey Anderson, who failed to bowl Cummins through the middle overs of the final's first innings while Smith ran rampant) because none of their previous T20 encounters have been in Australia. Nor have they played together in a domestic T20 down under.  

So how has a two-year-old tournament held in a non-Test playing nation been able to achieve something Australia’s own T20 league has not?

"It's new – being in America is obviously different to being in Australia, and having that experience is something players are really keen on having over here," Michael Klinger, the former first-class batter who is now the Washington Freedom general manager, told cricket.com.au.

"The other thing, which is pretty obvious, is it's a short tournament. It's a three-week tournament and players of that ilk, they're not coming for the money. They're coming for the experience. They don't need the money.

"This year was unique as well because the tournament was on the back of a World Cup which was played in America and the Caribbean, so lot of these players were already quite close to where we were playing."

The value of Australia’s star power aside, what this latest MLC campaign also revealed was how an increasing number of Australians are driving the fortunes of MLC. 

It was a source of pride for Cricket NSW (CNSW) and Cricket Victoria (CV) that this year's finalists – the only two (of six) MLC teams not affiliated with IPL ownership groups – are basically extensions of their own high-performance programs.

Washington Freedom are aligned with CNSW, where Klinger was until recently its head of male T20 cricket, while San Fransisco Unicorns have a similar partnership with CV, whose current general manager of cricket, Graham Manou, also attended the tournament.

The Washington and San Fransisco franchises are owned by Indian and Indian-American tech entrepreneurs, but CNSW and CV receive funding from the clubs in exchange for providing high-performance expertise and personnel.

Both teams' off-field staff are almost entirely made up of Australians. Ex-Test stars Ricky Ponting and Shane Watson are the team’s respective head coaches, complemented by Aussie support staff in Cameron White, Shawn Bradstreet (Washington), Ben Rohrer and Adam Griffith (San Fransisco). MLC's tournament director is Canberra-born Justin Geale, while San Fransisco's GM David White, CV's former head of community cricket, works with Manou in running the Unicorns.

Of the 22 players who featured in the final on Monday morning (AEST), eight were Australian. A further eight took part in the competition. Travis Head was the tournament's most valuable player, while Smith was player of the match in the final.

On the flipside, many of San Fransisco and Washington's local American players had travelled to Australia during last summer's Big Bash.

"We made sure that they were exposed to the professionalism of high-level cricket, which not all of them had been exposed to, and play some games against high-quality opposition," said Klinger.

"To have them exposed to that no doubt has given us an advantage. Just from observing this tournament, it looks like at Washington Freedom and even San Francisco Unicorns, the local players have been the best in the competition."

In essence, the state associations are selling the success of Australian cricket.

That has not gone unnoticed; it is believed Cricket Australia is considering how it might have its own involvement in MLC, and there is an overriding desire to find tangible benefits for Australian cricket from the game’s growth in the USA, particularly ahead of cricket’s return to the Olympics at the 2028 Games in Los Angeles.

More immediately, that may come as soon as next month's KFC BBL overseas player draft, according to Klinger.

A host of American players, including some who helped USA pull off their shock win over Pakistan that fired them into the T20 World Cup's Super Eights stage in June, will be up for grabs.

Anderson, the former New Zealand international, featured for Hobart Hurricanes last season, but the likes of South Africa-born Andries Gous and former India U19 paceman Saurabh Netravalkar featuring in this summer's BBL would mark a step forward in the Australia-USA cricket relationship.

"I reckon there's going to be a few getting picked up," Klinger said. "There's two in our team who I think (are good chances). Andries Gous a wicketkeeper-batsman who obviously did really well in the World Cup.

"Netravalkar – he was the leading wicket-taker over here and did well in the World Cup as well, a left-arm bowler who can bowl with the new ball and bowl variations at the death. I thought Hassan Khan from the Unicorns, a left-arm orthodox bowler and left-hand middle-order batter, could provide a team with a great option as well.

"Teams would be crazy not to have a look at them, especially with the lack of high-end talent coming into the draft this year from overseas. I think having those guys at the middle to the lower levels will add a lot to some teams."

Driving the growth of US cricket has been the country’s large population who have south-Asian heritage.

The sell-out MLC final in Dallas underlined that community’s strong interest in the game, as did the enormous demand for tickets for the ICC's showpiece World Cup moment, the India-Pakistan match at a 'pop-up' stadium in New York.

Ponting believes more still more can be done by both the MLC and the ICC to develop the game among young Americans.

"I think there's a still a role for the players and the franchises. I think the World Cup missed a trick as well in not promoting the game more at grassroots level, getting into schools," Ponting, a broadcast commentator during the World Cup, said before the MLC final.

"That's where I think the next stage and growth will come from. This generation of American cricket fans, we can't just sit back and hope that they're going to promote the game.

"I think the game needs to do what it can to get out amongst kids. Baseball is such a big game for youngsters here in the US … (but) you go to a baseball game, it's four hours, there's not a lot of excitement that happens. I think it's less than one home-run hit per game.

"If you look at it that way, compared to what an entertainment package of three hours of cricket can bring to a younger generation, that's the way we should be looking at trying to promote the game here."

Those involved in recruiting the game’s best cricketers to their nascent league, are realistic about the road ahead, with Klinger pointing out next year’s international schedule may not be as kind to the competition.

The scarcity of viable venues – this year’s MLC was played at just two, in Dallas and in Morrisville, North Carolina – is another concern. There is also no women’s MLC, though the BBC has reported discussions on an American women’s league are in their infancy.

For the world’s best men’s players, however, the MLC offers advantages its competitors cannot.

Cummins spoke openly about how the Unicorns owners’ links to Silicon Valley and the venture-capital industry was a major draw for him in signing a four-year deal with the team – an unprecedented move for a current Australian Test captain.

Cummins and Fraser-McGurk's filmed Zoom call with Travis Bazzana, a former junior cricketer from Sydney who last month became the first Australian to be taken with the number one pick in the Major League Baseball draft, was another 'only in America' moment.

Australian cricketers' social media posts of playing golf at some of the world's best courses, attending MLB games, eating southern barbeque, and even going to a Morgan Wallen concert, were shrewd advertisements of a trip to the USA.

In this respect, Klinger is bullish that the MLC is ahead of England's soon-to-be-privatised Hundred competition. "Players are choosing it over the Hundred at the moment," he said.

"Who knows what happens in the future, that could change. In an ideal world I'd love to have those two tournaments separated. Potentially with the privatisation of the Hundred, there may be some duplicate owners in both leagues, if that's IPL setups or other setups.

"A short tournament where they can have maximum impact certainly helps (the MLC's appeal). It's going to be key for MLC down the track not to get too greedy and start to play too many games and make the tournament go longer.

"If they do that the likelihood is the best overseas players might not want to come. We've got to find that balance of keeping the tournament quite short and sharp and attracting the best players."