Cricket in Baton Rouge

http://digbatonrouge.com/article/the-city-s-hidden-game-7316/

THE CITY’S HIDDEN GAME

SMALL IN NUMBERS, THE BATON ROUGE CRICKET CLUB AIMS TO SPREAD A LARGELY UNKNOWN GAME

BY JACK BARLOW

POSTED NOV 27, 2013

It’s early on a sweltering Sunday afternoon when the cars start pulling into the parking lot. A bunch of men hop out and start to pull the gear from the back of a couple of cars; two battered flat bats, a couple of extra-bouncy tennis balls, two sets of bright yellow, plastic sticks called wickets … it’s a strange sight, so it’s no surprise when the occasional passerby throws a confused glance in their direction. This happens more often than not.

Cricket, little publicized in the U.S. at the best of times, is a rarity around these parts. It’s a game totally foreign - in both origin and concept - especially in a town that’s existence revolves around the most American of all sports. Far from the battering physicality of football, cricket has a genteel and very English image: tall men in white with curved moustaches tapping a leather ball around, polite applause, cups of tea … and gosh, did you see the way Jones crafted that googly down to fine leg, old chum?

Indeed. But cricket really isn’t so English anymore. Shedding its image as a game that’s utterly confusing while it takes forever to play, the last decade has seen it trim down and shift the center of its popularity from the United Kingdom to the Indian subcontinent. It’s essentially a simple game with many nuances; two teams of 11 players face off, the winner being the one who scores the most runs. One team bats while the other team fields, and they swap over when the first team either loses ten of its eleven batsmen or runs out of time. It is kind of like baseball, really, except with a flat bat and different ways of scoring runs.

The long (up to five day) test matches are still popular, but the focus is now on the crisper, shorter One Day and, especially, T20 formats. It’s the latter of these that’s the most recent innovation. It’s also shortest, and its popularity has soared. The Indian Premier League, an Indian T20 competition that gathers the best cricket players throughout the world, is now a billion dollar industry.

Unfortunately for cricket fans, there hasn’t been too much of a spillover into the U.S. market just yet. Despite early popularity – there were several teams from Philadelphia and Boston in the late 1800s that successfully toured the UK – the game has usually been played within immigrant communities from either the Indian subcontinent or the Caribbean.

It’s no different down here. The men running around the LSU car park a few Sundays ago were all from Nepal, and most of them are members of the LSU Nepalese Student Association. It’s all pretty ramshackle. They get together when they can, working around LSU events and schoolwork to gather and have a bit of fun for a few hours at a stretch. The organizer for the Nepalese crowd tends to be Ph.D student Asim Shrestha, both a tenacious batsman and threatening spin bowler.

“I grew up around cricket,” Shrestha says. “It’s the number one sport in Nepal and my family always played, so it was something that was often discussed. But it’s harder over here, and when I first started playing (in Baton Rouge) it was a hard time finding even eight players to get together.”

They gradually grew, and now turnout to their games is often around 15 or so – enough for a short Sunday afternoon crack around a parking lot. Playing on concrete instead of the usual grass is a drawback though, taking away the athleticism of those in the field.

“You can’t go diving around, fielding properly,” says fellow player Devesh Lamichhane. “It’s not the best playing surface since you run the risk of injury. You have to be careful, but it’s really more like a social occasion. We get together and drink beer, talk cricket, play cricket.”

“If it wasn’t for cricket I wouldn’t have met a lot of people I know now,” adds Shrestha. “I’ve met a lot of people from my own country. We try and do it whenever we can. It’s a good way to stay in touch.”

It’s a similar story with Hari Devadas, who founded the official Baton Rouge Cricket Club with Cherian Korah back in 2008 after discovering that, well, there actually wasn’t one. Originally from India, Devadas moved to Baton Rouge in 2004 after living in the cricket-rich environs of Southern California. The lack of an official cricket club, even a small one, took him aback.

“There are 72-team tournaments in California, and I played a lot when I lived there,” he says.

“But when I came here I found there wasn’t a team. We started with only five or six people, a tennis ball and a cricket bat and began to play on Saturday mornings. Slowly, people started coming out … so in 2008 we founded the team officially and by 2010 we had around 50 members.”

The club, while still fairly small, often plays tournaments both locally and with other Louisiana cricket clubs. Lafayette has a renowned one although, unsurprisingly, it’s New Orleans that’s the cricket mainstay of Louisiana, with some clubs reaching back 40 years.

Competitive though it may sometimes be, it’s still more an excuse to gather and have a bit of fun. “We have people from different ages, some older guys and some young baseball hotshots,” Devadas says. “I tell the guys to have fun – it’s only three or four hours and you’re going to be working all week, so enjoy it.”

And that’s how it goes. It doesn’t have the all-encompassing popularity of the homegrown sports or the college-led enthusiasm of rugby; instead, cricket’s an under-the-radar social phenomenon. It’s an excuse for people with different backgrounds to gather for a few hours a week and reconnect, to talk about the great batsmen and bowlers of a sport that few recognize here, yet it is so integral to the identity of those who play and follow it. And, with a true local touch, it’s also a reason to drink a few beers.

It’s hard to say whether said beers played a part in the result of last month’s Nepalese fixture, although it’s possible. Chasing a solid score, it all comes down to Shrestha and Lamichhane, the last two batsmen for the fielding team. In a ‘bottom of the ninth’-type scenario, the two need another 20 or so runs to win, with not much time left. They’re doing their best. Cracking the ball high and wide, they scramble for anything they can get, surviving numerous dropped catches and missed opportunities to close in on an unlikely win. But it’s not enough. Shrestha, on a roll, goes for one big hit too many and fires it straight into the welcoming hands of a catcher. Game over.

The batsmen shrug, the fielders high five, and everyone trundles off for one more Budweiser. “Ah well,” a philosophical Shrestha says between sips. “There’s always next time, right?”