4 min readSep 5, 2026 02:33 PM IST
Despite USA being the co-host of the T20 World Cup in 2024 where its cricket team scored an upset win over Pakistan in the group stage to advance to the Super 8s, cricket still finds itself among emerging sports in the USA. While the nation has a league like Major League Cricket, cricket in general is yet to find a major foothold in the country. Former Australia captain Ricky Ponting believes rebranding cricket as T20 in the USA will work in a country like the USA.
“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. 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,” Ponting told The Athletic.
When asked about how ODI and Test cricket could also be promoted in the USA, Ponting was cynical.
“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.” said Ponting.
Major League Cricket was started in 2023 and currently sees a total of six city-based franchises play in a six-week-long tournament hosted in California and Texas. Despite all teams not having home venues, the league still draws big names as investors with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen apart from India’s Ambani family as owners of a MLC team.
The league, which will expand to eight teams in coming years, is also seeing participation of players like Steve Smith.
Ponting, who is the head coach of Washington Freedom, shared how the growth of cricket in the USA has been slower than he expected. “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,” said Ponting.
Story continues below this ad
The former Australian captain also spoke about how more kids can be poached away from a game like baseball at a young age. “There are more kids we can get involved with 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 US, tapping into the entertainment package that T20 provides. 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,” said Ponting.
