US ProCricket season ends on hopeful note

As its inaugural season draws towards a close in early September, US ProCricket can look back on having achieved several firsts in US cricket -- and a future that, while still uncertain, is decidedly more promising than first assumed.

This was the first time that an independent national cricket league has established itself in the USA. It has been tried several times in the last decade, but most of those efforts ran out of steam almost before they started. That US ProCricket was able to do so in spite of efforts to derail it from inside and outside the US makes the achievement especially notable.

The opposition to US ProCricket was especially fierce and unrelenting from the United States of America Cricket Association (USACA) and, rather surprisingly, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). The USACA always viewed ProCricket with a jaundiced eye, seeing it as an encroachment on its sacrosanct turf. It did its best to prevent any cricketers with aspirations of representing the USA in internationals from playing for ProCricket. The attempt to blackball the new league was also energetically supported by the BCCI, which threatened Indian internationals with unspecified sanctions if they so much as touched bat or ball on American soil. The International Cricket Council tiptoed around these positions, first declaring it had nothing against ProCricket and then saying that what ICC member countries did with players under contract to them was their own business. This was a remarkable position considering that neither India nor the USACA had signed contracts with their players, but ICC's calculated ambiguity seems to be more and more its style these days.

How ProCricket was able to deal with this triple threat to its existence -- what corners had to be cut, what plans drastically altered -- is a saga all its own. ProCricket managed to survive these vicissitudes, and even introduced some innovations as it strained to complete its inaugural season. It put American cricketers on the same teams as its first-class overseas players, experimenting with a synergy that had never been tried in US cricket before. Its five-ball over compressed the 20-over format into 100 balls per innings, and "decimalised" scoring formulas. ProCricket was the first domestic cricket ever to be broadcast live on US television, as the DISH satellite network picked up its league schedule. And ProCricket was reported on in England, Pakistan, India and the West Indies, the first time that any cricket played within the USA has ever been seriously examined outside North America.

This is not to say that ProCricket did not have problems. It did -- and some of these were of its own making. Its public communications were often inconsistent, and sometimes abysmal, and its website was confusing. Facilities in some of the eight ProCricket team sites were poor, and management was lackadaisical. The recruitment process for both the overseas and local players was mystifying, and kept changing. Some of ProCricket's innovations, like rotating international players between teams but keeping local players at their own league sites, seemed not to have been thought out in advance. It seemed at times that ProCricket was tripping over itself in its haste to be too many things to too many people, and this was producing an unnecessary angst in many of its ardent supporters. The last thing ProCricket needs is a US cricketing public that is turned off by an ill-conceived and badly executed programme. Yet this is precisely what might happen if ProCricket does not get its own house in order before its next season.

On the whole, however, the portents for the future were hopeful for US ProCricket, and there is every reason to believe it will be become a permanent feature of the American cricket landscape if it can get its act together.

ProCricket has already accomplished far more than its detractors had ever assumed. Next year, 2005, may be the season when it is able to fully come into its own.