Ricky Ponting unveils radical plan to popularise cricket in USA: 'Poaching kids away from baseball to play T20'

Ricky Ponting unveils radical plan to popularise cricket in USA: 'Poaching kids away from baseball to play T20' originally appeared on Cricket News. Add Cricket News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

Ricky Ponting says cricket must actively "poach" young baseball players by promoting T20 at the grassroots level in the USA.

The Australian legend admits MLC's growth has been slower than expected and criticises the league's lack of proactive community promotion.

With T20 set for the 2028 LA Olympics and a new stadium being built in California, the sport's American future looks promising.

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Ricky Ponting urges US grassroots cricket push: Why ex-Australia captain wants to target young baseball athletes for T20

Ricky Ponting has a blueprint for cricket's American revolution, and it involves going after baseball's youngest fans before they've fully committed to the diamond.

The former Australia captain, now two years deep into coaching Washington Freedom in Major League Cricket, has laid out his most detailed thinking yet on what it would actually take to make T20 cricket stick in the United States.

None of this is new territory, exactly. Cricket has been trying to crack the American market for decades, with very little to show for it. The Pro Cricket League launched in 2004 with a simplified format of five-ball overs instead of the standard six, a gimmick later repurposed in England's The Hundred, and folded after a single season.

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MORE: Ricky Ponting wants to drop the word 'cricket' to make the 'T20' sport popular in USA

Other competitions and exhibition events followed over the years, drawing in the South Asian, Caribbean and Australian diaspora communities who already loved the game, but consistently falling short of building the broader American audience that would make the sport financially sustainable.

The 2024 T20 World Cup, co-hosted by the US and the West Indies, delivered moments that made American sports fans sit up and pay attention. The India vs Pakistan clash at Eisenhower Park in Nassau County was a sellout so complete that resale tickets were changing hands for thousands of dollars. And when the US national side stunned Pakistan in the group stage, a new audience materialised almost instantly; one that had a home team to cheer for.

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Ponting calls for grassroots action and brands T20 as entertainment

Ponting has been inside MLC long enough to see both what's working and what isn't, and he isn't shy about naming the problem. Speaking to The Athletic, he made clear he believes the league hasn't done nearly enough to get out into communities and promote the sport at the ground level.

"One of the reasons I got involved in MLC at the start was because I wanted to be here in the U.S. and be part of the growth, and it's just been a little slower than I would have liked," he said. "I don't think they've been active enough in getting out there and promoting it at the grassroots level."

His solution is disarmingly direct, as the former Aussie skipper suggested, to go after the same pool of young athletes that baseball has long claimed as its own.

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"There are more kids we can get involved at a young age and we can start poaching some kids away from baseball to play T20. That's where it's got to go if we want the game to really grow quickly here in the U.S., tapping into the entertainment package that T20 provides," he said.

"If you compare it to a game of baseball, they're similar lengths of time, but you've got so much more happening in T20 cricket than baseball."

MORE: Ricky Ponting claims Australia will look for a new No. 3 batter for South Africa Test series

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Drop the word 'cricket' and sell it as T20 instead

Ponting is a self-proclaimed traditionalist who played far more Test cricket than T20 during his career, and yet he still argues that in a market like the US, the word "cricket" itself is part of the problem.

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"If I was bringing it here wholly and solely to sell and promote the game, I wouldn't call it cricket. It'd just be rebranded as T20 only," he said.

"Leave the cricket thing aside. As soon as young people hear cricket in parts of the world where they're not brought up on the game, they think about it being a long, drawn-out, five-day game, and it's not that."

The comparison he keeps returning to is baseball, something any American sports fan instinctively understands.

"I would compare it to baseball as much as I could and give kids that chance to understand you're hitting 15 sixes per game in a game of T20 cricket, but you are hitting less than one home run a game in the game of baseball."

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When pushed on whether dropping the word "cricket" felt like a betrayal of his roots, Ponting was unmoved.

"Not in a market like this, where you're trying to have a sport emerge and break through," he said.

"I've got no worry about that at all. I love the game of Test match cricket. I played a lot more Test cricket than I played T20, but I'm working a lot on the T20 game now."

MORE: Batters with most sixes in Test international cricket: Rishabh Pant overtakes Adam Gilchrist's 100 sixes tally

Ponting is right, but MLC needs to move faster

Ponting's grassroots criticism is the most important point he's making. Every major sport that has taken root in a new market, soccer in the US being the obvious example, did so by getting into schools and youth programmes early, giving kids equipment, coaching and a reason to care before they'd fully committed to something else.

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MLC's relative passivity on that front has been a waste of a few years, and Ponting is right to call it out.

The baseball comparison is also the smartest communication tool the sport has in America. Americans aren't going to relate to cricket through abstract descriptions or history lessons. They'll relate to it when someone tells them it's basically baseball but with three times as many big hits per game and a format that wraps up in roughly the same amount of time. That's not dumbing it down; that's smart marketing.

However, the 2028 Olympics is the moment that could change everything if cricket handles it correctly. A home crowd watching T20 at the LA Games, with American athletes potentially competing on the fringes of the sport in future, could do more for cricket's US footprint than a decade of league matches.

But it only works if the groundwork is laid beforehand: schools running cricket days and MLC franchises making community visits. If that doesn't happen, the Olympics will be another moment of brief viral excitement that fades as quickly as the US team's World Cup win did.

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