At Cricket World Cup, a Group of Underdogs Gets a Rare Opportunity

It would be hard to find two words that seem so ill-matched as “Afghanistan cricket.”

Yet this month, the national team of that war-torn country will begin play in cricket’s biggest international tournament, the World Cup, which is being hosted by Australia and New Zealand. It is a huge opportunity for the Afghan team, which has never before made the cut but has earned the praise of both the Taliban and Hillary Clinton.

The stories of cricket in Afghanistan and in other former outposts of the British Empire and beyond are the subject of “Second XI,” a new collection of essays edited and mostly written by the cricket journalists Tim Wigmore and Peter Miller. (In cricket, the first team is known as the first eleven.) Avoiding the well-known national teams, Wigmore and Miller focus on the development and prospects of cricket in Ireland, Kenya, Papua New Guinea and Nepal, among others, as well as efforts to make the game more popular in the United States and China.

Why does the I.C.C. continue to prop up American cricket? For the same reason that it invests in China, where the game has virtually no history: If it can make the sport popular in these two countries, it will have enormous commercial opportunities. China’s adoption has been slow, in part because cricket is not an Olympic sport, although the game has long been played in Hong Kong.

Still, the commercial potential has gotten the attention of American broadcasters. ESPN is offering live streaming of the World Cup’s matches online for $99, hoping to lure cricket fans living in the United States willing to stay up late to watch their favorite teams.

Those hoping for an upset by one of the four associate nations in the tournament may want to tune in now; the next World Cup, set for 2019, will have only 10 teams, meaning it is possible that none of the traditional underdogs will even qualify.

The New York Times