Australian great Ricky Ponting has suggested a radical change in the way cricket is marketed in the United States, saying the sport should be promoted simply as ‘T20’ rather than cricket.
Despite co-hosting the 2024 T20 World Cup and stunning Pakistan in the group stage to reach the Super 8s, the USA still has a long way to go before cricket becomes a mainstream sport. Major League Cricket has given the game a professional platform, but cricket continues to compete with baseball, American football and basketball for attention.
Ponting believes the word ‘cricket’ itself could be putting off young Americans who have grown up with other sports and associate cricket with the traditional five-day format.
“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 (Twenty20 cricket) only. 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,” Ponting told The Athletic.
The former Australia captain suggested using baseball to explain T20 to American audiences, highlighting the number of sixes that can be hit in a game compared to the relatively low number of home runs in baseball.
“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,” he said.
PONTING NOT KEEN ON TESTS, ODIs IN USA
Ponting does not believe there is much value in trying to promote Test or ODI cricket in the USA while the sport is still attempting to establish itself.
“Not in a market like this, where you’re trying to have a sport emerge and break through. I’ve got no worry about that at all. I love the game of Test cricket. I played a lot more Test cricket than I played T20, but I’m working a lot on the T20 game now,” he said.
Major League Cricket, which began in 2023, currently features six city-based franchises in a six-week tournament staged across California and Texas. While the teams do not all have dedicated home venues, the league has attracted several high-profile investors, including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and India’s Ambani family.
MLC is expected to expand to eight teams in the coming years and has also attracted established international players, with Australian star Steve Smith among those to have featured in the competition.
Ponting, who is the head coach of Washington Freedom, has been involved with MLC from its early stages. However, he admitted that the growth of cricket in the USA has been slower than he had hoped.
“One of the reasons I got involved in MLC at the start was because I wanted to be here in the USA and be part of the growth, and it’s just been a little slower than I would have liked. I don’t think they’ve been active enough in getting out there and promoting it at the grassroots level,” Ponting said.
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