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A big-time cricket tournament is coming to Indianapolis after all.
The International Cricket Council plans to hold the Americas Division One Twenty20 tournament at Indianapolis’ World Sports Park in May.
Teams from the U.S., Canada, Bermuda and Suriname will compete in a double round-robin tournament May 3-10 with the top two teams advancing to the 14-team ICC World Qualifier July 6-26 in Ireland and Scotland. The top teams from that event will advance to the 2016 world championships in India.
Twenty20—or T20—is the short format of cricket, with the typical game taking about three hours.
Indianapolis was set to host a national championship for a separate cricket association last August. But that operation, USA Cricket Association, is on shaky financial footing and facing penalties from the sport’s international sanctioning body.
City officials and cricket experts say the International Cricket Council event is certain to happen because of its massive and powerful sponsor.
“The ICC is hosting the event, and the ICC is very stable. The organization is 150 years old,” said Jatin Patel, an advisory board member and coaching director for the American Cricket Federation, a rival to USACA. “This is a big step for the sport of cricket in this city and for the growing number of people here who love the sport.”
To further bolster the local event, the ICC has landed Pepsi as a title sponsor. Two years ago, when this event was last held, it was played in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. This time around, ICC officials said they chose Indianapolis because they favor Indianapolis’ central location and wanted to try an event at the new World Sports Park.
City officials said some details of the event are still being worked out, including admission price. If there is an admission price, city officials promised it would be “minimal.”
Mayor Greg Ballard three years ago began pushing for the transformation of the 48-acre Post Road Community Park on the city’s east side into a facility that could host various international sports including cricket, rugby, hurling and Gaelic football.
During an international trade mission in India in 2013, Ballard told a group that he and his staff were hoping to turn the World Sports Park into a hotbed for national and international cricket events.
Ballard hopes growing the sport of cricket here city will help multi-national companies like Eli Lilly and Co. and Roche Diagnostics attract and retain an international workforce.
Some local taxpayers have criticized Ballard for spending so much money on what amounts to a cricket facility. Ballard insists the World Sports Park is a multi-purpose venue.
There’s no denying how popular cricket is. Nearly 1 billion people watched a recent World Cup game featuring India and Pakistan in Australia, according to the ICC. More than 135 million people watched in India alone.
To put that in perspective, 144.4 million people watched the Super Bowl on Feb. 2, according to New York-based Nielsen Media Research.
After the plans with USA Cricket Association fizzled out last year, Ballard scaled back plans for the World Sports Park from $6 million to $5.3 million. Still, city officials insist it’s a top-flight venue poised to draw top-level events.
“The quality of the fields at the World Sports Park are professional grade,” said Lesley Gordon, director of communications for IndyParks. “There aren’t many field of this quality around, and that’s a big reason the International Cricket Council decided to host its event here.”
The World Sports Park hosted cricket games and a local tournament last September and October, but this will be the first major event.
“They loved the whole setup, and now we just can’t wait for this event to really showcase this [venue] in a bigger way," Gordon said.
Usually, teams of this level travel with a 30- to 50-person entourage. Though ESPN and other cable channels have been increasing the amount of coverage they give cricket, the locally held event won’t likely be televised. Patel thinks the event could draw anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand people.
“The sport of cricket here is growing for sure,” he said. “We’ve seen growth in our events of 85 percent since 2000.”
Gordon thinks the upcoming tournament will be a critical stepping stone to more and bigger events.
“We think this will showcase the game here and show what these events are all about,” Gordon said.
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