“We can play every weekend at the existing grounds, and new grounds are still on the way,” said Kishore Bandramuri, 33, who grew up in the Indian metropolis of Hyderabad, played in the league, and has lived in Houston since 2018.
Over coffee, when asked that a visitor had mapped out 22 cricket grounds around the megalopolis, Tanweer Ahmed, a Houston restaurant magnate, philanthropist and cricket ground funder, replied: “Actually there are more. Over 30 now.”
Taken together, it all speaks to the world's second-biggest sport's budding popularity in America, with the T20 Cricket World Cup starting in Dallas on Saturday and then running through June in the Caribbean and the United States.
Far east of downtown Houston in Baytown, players play on the grass between the soccer and four baseball fields in front of the water park, occasionally squealing from the surf slide. An hour west, in Stafford City Park, a cricket tournament is taking place just beyond six bustling basketball hoops in a neat pavilion. In addition to tables piled high with trophies lining their respective shelves, there's also the ever-welcoming fact that someone has brought a big drum.
The cricket-hunting map is dotted with world-class, well-maintained grounds and drab, unkempt fields. Saki Muhammad, who built the Musa Cricket Stadium in Pearland a decade ago, points out that more than 50 teams in the Houston metropolitan area “play with hard balls used in top-level competitions,” and more than 100 play “softball cricket,” made with rubber or tennis balls wrapped in electrical tape, as people marvel at his composure. “The growth of cricket has been immense since I first got interested in it,” said Waleed Zaman, 22, whose family emigrated from Peshawar, Pakistan, 12 years ago. [playing] The cricket team was much smaller than it is in Houston today.”
He points out that there are currently six leagues – one premier league and five amateur leagues – plus a “Saturday league” where players might show off their skills.
“Parking lot cricket is big in Houston,” Naqi said.
Cricket never ousted football as king or stole the Astros' audiences, and living in a sprawling city, it's easy to go unnoticed. But as South Asian immigration grew, fueling Houston's dazzling diversity, cricket stadiums added to its tapestry.
They're on main streets and byways near mini-marts with gas stations, farms where horses hang out in the heat, an All America towing company, a bakery selling specialty products from Kerala, India, political candidate signs, charter schools, churches and used-car dealerships. Or far west of the city, in the middle of the cultivated fields of Wallis, six light poles stand along a two-lane road with the occasional house, where players say there's sometimes a mist or dew that adds to the rich nuances of the cricket.
Sugar Land's busy roads reflect the neighborhood's diversity with an Islamic center, Iglesia Christiania, a Buddhist temple, an Assembly of God church called Firebrand, and, behind a group of stone apartment buildings, a handsome cricket field.
Located well northwest of downtown Houston, the park has a unique international feel and an attractive scoreboard that keeps track of runs, overs and wickets.
The six-field Prairie View Cricket Complex, about 53 miles (at times congested) northwest of the city, hosted a high-level match between the United States and Bangladesh last weekend. It hosted a women's tournament in April and a 26-team collegiate tournament in March. The 10,000-capacity grass courts are expensive to maintain, but Ahmed feels “a little proud” of the high standard. As Naqi says, “the ball behaves differently” here, and it's a “proper facility.”
The ground, the international matches being played there and the T20 World Cup in the US “are a dream come true, honestly,” says Ahmed, who has lived in Houston since 2007 and been based in the US since 1988. Ahmed has had an extraordinary life, from growing up poor in a village near Sialkot, Pakistan, to purchasing the ground's first 14 acres in 2018 and rising to many heights. “I never thought it would get to this point. It literally started with me trying to play on it myself and then all of a sudden I decided to buy more and more land.”
Back in the city, the Mohammed Musa Stadium, located south of Pearland town centre, features a referee room, commentary booths, a media centre and VIP boxes.
“Most of the people in my community and in the business world told me, 'Look, what you're doing is not going to happen,'” says Muhammad, a native of Karachi, Pakistan, who has lived in Houston since 1996. “'Cricket is not going anywhere.' That's why 10 years ago I was called a crazy guy.” And now, “not all dreams come true, but this is one that did.” He points out that Moosa hosted 12 one-day international matches in 2022 alone.
At Babar Noor's high school, the other students know he and one other student are cricketers, but they don't seem to know exactly what that means. On a recent Sunday, Noor carpooled with four fellow players from 6 to 8 a.m. from Clear Lake, well south-southeast of downtown Houston, to Katy, well northwest. “I consider myself lucky,” he said of all that, World Cup participation and all.
“I wish there was a high school team, but oh well,” says Noor, 17, who was born in Houston to parents from Karachi. “That's the only thing I wish there was.”
Indeed, there was a sense of pleasant surprise among many of the players who took part in Sunday's game on the field in Katy.
“So when I came [to the United States 12 years ago]Nadir Hussain, 35, from Hyderabad, who moved there at age 23 to do his master's degree, wondered, “Will I end up playing cricket? Will it be as common as it is back home in India?” “To my surprise, my university [Houston Clear Lake] We had a cricket team that competed at local and national levels.”
From a cricketing perspective, what it means to land here has changed.
“People who moved here 30 or 40 years ago never would have expected something like this to happen in America,” said Pradeep Das, 24, also from Hyderabad, who has been here for three years, and who now sees “every country” sending “their players” to play in Houston, particularly Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans.
Sairam Mandadi, 31, a native of Hyderabad who has been in the US for the past 18 months, said he feels there are more cricket venues for the average player in Houston than in India. “I'm really happy to be a part of Houston,” he said. In fact, he stopped playing around age 22 and later moved to a neighborhood near the Texans' NRG Stadium that has a large Indian student population.
“I got motivated again,” he says. “And that's the main reason I love this city. I don't think I'd ever go anywhere else! Trust me.”
Cricket, alongside his career in IT, has led him into an unexpected cricket wonderland – meaning even if he only gets one or two or a few balls in a match, he'll be obsessed with cricket during the week and rambling on and on about it at social occasions, to the point that his wife asks if they can change the topic.
“Trust me, when we get together as a family we all get so bored because all the boys talk about cricket,” he said.
That's why they're together: “To be together,” Bandramuri says, “and to be with other teams,” often of nationalities who would never have met otherwise.
And they're assessing the situation. “We just had a storm on Sunday, so the grass hadn't been mowed,” said Naimesh Patel, 42, a former U.S. military officer who has lived in Houston since 2014. “So the ball didn't fly. Then, for the last 30 minutes, we had a crosswind, so we were able to take advantage of that in our bowling.”
And they're feeling a deep emotion, a kind of nostalgia. “It's one of those games where you get so absorbed in the game that you forget about everything else,” Hussain says. “It's just for the game for a couple of hours, and then it's back to reality.”
And in the coming weeks, they'll all have their eyes on the latest World Cup: T20, the fastest and newest of cricket's three major games, designed to capture the attention span of a limited audience over a roughly three-hour match. Samad Alnawaz, 21, a student at Texas A&M University, was born in Galveston, and his parents are from Karachi. He's traveling with friends to Grand Prairie, Dallas' neighbor, for the June 6 match between the U.S. and Pakistan. “I'm not going to miss the chance to see Pakistan for the first time,” said the lifelong American.
The plan is well thought out: drive to Dallas-Fort Worth the night before, get some sleep, and then arrive as close to dawn as possible at the stadium, next to Lone Star Racetrack and with the flags of America's six major league cricket teams hanging on its walls, so you don't want to miss the warm-up.
“Seeing what they do before the match is just as much fun as the match itself,” said Alnawaz, who imagines being there for perhaps eight hours straight.
Soon after, another high-profile match will take place far away on Long Island.
“Imagine Pakistan playing India on June 9,” Ahmed said. “I guarantee it will be watched by 1.5 billion people around the world. Who would have thought back in 2016 that we'd be hosting an international match here in 2024? It's incredible. It feels great.”
