It'll be a net positive I agree: its just that they are spending loads of money on this (they've apparently given a fair few millions to the ICC in order to do this, they're paying the players to play and I can't imagine that hiring out three MLB grounds for the time required to prepare the ground, get a drop-in in, play the game and then return the ground to its original condition is cheap. There's so much more that they could have done if they wanted to grow the game with that money that ought to come before "all-star" games between retired players. Besides, even if there was a huge growth in the game because of this there is the fact that America don't have a governing body for Cricket at the moment (the USACA are suspended and the ICC have had to do lots of the things that the board are supposed to do - they had a big NFL-combine style thing to try and find new players for all the North American countries which might help in America where the USACA have been unwilling or unable to get non-expats to play international cricket and haven't done a thing about it. Honestly, USA Rugby and the USACA are kind of total opposites in their approaches to try and grow a sport, and one approach are clearly worked a hell of a lot better than the other one.
I disagree that the crowds will be particularly large - we've had several of these competitions with a very similar group of people (basically without Warne, Tendulkar and the newly retired people - and they've drawn hundreds and the people going will only go to watch Tendulkar play. He's the main thing that differentiates this from the other attempts to do this - they tried something similar in the Rogers Centre in Toronto and despite having lots of relatively big cricket names very little people showed up. Even with him they're going t struggle for the Houston game: announcing a Wednesday afternoon event a month in advance doesn't exactly give people time to get time off work and . The advantage that they have is that Indian-Americans are more affluent than the average population so they can afford to spend the money on tickets: that's probably a big factor behind the prices all being so damn high - up to $350 at Dodgers Stadium. They sold 1,000 tickets to the Houston game on day 1, that doesn't exactly suggest that there's a huge rush for them. That's including the tickets bought by touts and the like as well, so who knows. People will probably buy in late, especially if prices go down which I could see happening: they don't exactly want empty houses... One good thing they should do is donate a bunch of tickets to local clubs and the like since that would get them a great deal of good will, that is unlikely though.
At least they are trying something: I'll give them that. Its much, much better than the continual ignorant posts about how "Americans won't get cricket, they're stupid!" and the like. There's the fact that Americans seem to love sports with obtuse rules (
American Football is
full of them, and Baseball isn't much better) and Cricket fits right in with that tradition! We'll never be bigger than American Football or Baseball, but if we could get Cricket to a similar size to some of the smaller sports then that would be a positive in that we'd actually be on the map, rather than totally not present at all!
