Pro cricket coming to Grand Prairie

By David Mullen

The home of Trader’s Village, Louis Tussauds Palace of Wax, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!, Lone Star Park and Epic Waters indoor waterpark is going global. Major League Cricket (MLC) is coming to Grand Prairie.

Cricket is like Indian food. It is popular to billions of people, but an acquired taste in the U.S. A group of investors, politicians and officials think that Americans will have the appetite for a new sport, which is more than 400 years old.  

 Formerly the home of the minor league baseball AirHogs, MLC received approval from the City of Grand Prairie on a long-term lease agreement to begin an extensive redevelopment of AirHogs Stadium on Lone Star Parkway near Interstate 30 as the organization’s first major cricket stadium in the U.S. Prestigious Dallas design firm HKS has been hired to repurpose the baseball field into what will be a world-class stadium for cricket.   

“As the first Major League Cricket stadium in the U.S., Grand Prairie represents a seminal moment for the sport in America and we are incredibly excited to partner with the City of Grand Prairie to bring Major League Cricket to Dallas,” said Sameer Mehta, co-founder of MLC. “Grand Prairie’s centralized location in the U.S. and the thriving Texas cricketing community, allied with the quality of the facility, made it the perfect site for us and we are certain that this is the beginning of a fruitful long-term partnership with the City that will bring much success.”

In a Zoom call which attracted media from Australia, the UAE, the UK, India and the U.S., Grand Prairie Mayor Ron Jensen said: “I never thought we’d be playing cricket here, but we’re fixing to. And it’s going be fun, I tell you. It is similar to baseball. Pitchers have similar curveballs, and all that.” 

I am not sure if Jensen, doffing a cowboy hat, knew if he was getting a sports team or a cellular franchise, but he would not be alone. Despite its worldwide popularity, the rules of cricket are virtually unknown to almost all local sports fans. 

The new team, unnamed and slated to begin in 2022, will play an abbreviated form of cricket called Twenty-20 (referred to as T20). A typical cricket match can last for days. In T20, the game is about three hours. Each inning will last about 90 minutes with a 10-minute break between the innings, so the length of the match will be similar to a football or baseball game. 

Two teams play a single inning. Each team bats for a maximum of 20 overs, which consists of six consecutive legal deliveries bowled from one end of a cricket pitch to the player batting at the other end. No more than five fielders can be on the leg side at any time.

Even though it will be played outdoors, I can’t help but call it “Arena Cricket.”

The T20 format has been tested and become popular in other parts of the globe. There are nations that play the game in competitions, and the reigning World Champions are the West Indies team.

USA Cricket claims more than 150,000 players across the country, with roughly 20 million fans and more than four million regular viewers of cricket.

MLC, exclusively sanctioned by USA Cricket, represents the most ambitious venture ever undertaken in the American cricket landscape. They are focused on educating potential fans and bringing the top international cricketers in from around the world. 

The revamped AirHogs Stadium will accommodate approximately 10,000 fans with seats and suites. It will also have a High-Performance Training Center to support both the USA’s Men’s and Women’s teams, with the goal of elevating them to the highest level of international competition.

Paraag Marathe, the chairman of USA Cricket, said: “This a watershed moment for us. We are pretty excited. We want to compete at the highest levels in World Cups and international matches. And the first piece of that was putting down a flagship stadium right in the heart of the country. 

“This isn’t like we are planting seeds,” Marathe said. “The seeds have already been planted years ago. The roots are already growing. There are already millions of cricket fans in this country. There are hundreds of thousands of cricket players. There are almost 50 teams playing in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. So those roots are already there. This is about bringing us closer to them. We are going to put Grand Prairie on the global map. We are not talking about a couple of million people watching. We are talking about almost a billion people watching.”   

The world is taking notice. Now it remains to be seen if local sports fans have a taste for a sport that, to this point, has lacked spice. If so, Trader’s Village had better be ready for the overflow crowds.