Cricket: An American dream

The Black Caps met Sri Lanka in an exhibition match in Florida in 2010 but it had only mixed success. Photo / Dean Purcell

New Zealand Cricket further progresses its American dream in Florida this morning.

At 7am, New Zealand starts the first of two Twenty20 internationals against the West Indies at Central Broward Regional Park in Fort Lauderdale, less than 40 minutes north of central Miami.

Promoting cricket as a spectacle in the United States is the aim behind the matches as NZC is preparing to invest intellectual property and playing stocks in a proposed six-team US Twenty20 league midway through next year.

The three-week tournament will be organised by Cricket Holdings America (a company with the United States governing body and NZC as shareholders). Fort Lauderdale, Toronto, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia are potential host cities.

In a plan scoped out over 8-10 years, CHA (and NZC) hope to sell the franchises to investors for a total sum of up to US$240 million.

Given NZC is not investing direct cash in the venture, it is potentially a smart business strategy. The alternative is NZC continuing to be restricted to selling matches within its home market while the likes of established high-rollers India, Australia, England and South Africa reap the benefits of more lucrative deals. NZC could earn future revenue from negotiating broadcast deals within the US market.

However, the current "advertisement" is not helped by the absence of four better New Zealand T20 players - Daniel Vettori, Brendon McCullum, Jesse Ryder and James Franklin.

The stakes of the NZC gambit are further upped by the sport's credibility being under threat in the US. That follows the loss-making failure of the first international foray in May 2010 when New Zealand played Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka had just finished its civil war which meant the United States insisted on high security. That meant employing the US military, hotel shifts and regular struggles to get cricket gear through security.

In the actual matches, low, slow wickets meant batsmen got minimal momentum in their shot-making and bowlers got limited pace and bounce. Just four sixes and 375 runs were scored in the two games.

On the upside, the practice wickets and block the teams will play on are understood to have improved substantially. Veteran Eden Park groundsman Mark Perham helped monitor some of the wicket progress after being seconded to Fort Lauderdale while on a recent US holiday.

Research also suggests there are 15 million cricket "supporters" in the US. Many are part of expatriate sub-continent and Caribbean populations. Similar-sized cricket fanbases exist in Australia and South Africa.

New Zealand players and management have generally said the right things this week about supposed local interest and the responsibility of putting on a spectacle. However, Andrew Ellis may have been closer to the truth when he said "there is no reference to cricket anywhere around this part of the world" in a recent newspaper column, especially in the wake of the Miami Heat winning the NBA basketball crown. Let the scrutiny of the US cricket experiment (mark II) begin.