A Random Person's Random Musings

In this entry in usa_cricket, I very deliberately omitted some of my thoughts, which would have belonged in the last paragraph of that entry.  Those thoughts can be summed up as follows:

Major League Cricket has more of an interest in a successful outcome than USACA possibly could, because MLC is expecting a (long term) return on its investment - it is a profit-making corporation, rather than a non-profit organization, and thus its principals' personal financial success will depend on the organization's. This is a model that has - time and again - worked well in the United States, especially for sports (try telling me that any of our professional sports networks would have been as successful if the overall organization weren't in it for the money!) - and there is no reason why cricket should be any different. The only thing that any of USACA's principals can expect to get out of their organization is (a) power, and/or (b) a sense of satisfaction in a job well-done - but if they don't care about (b), there's no incentive to do the job any better than the minimum necessary - which seems to be pretty low.

Rather than maintain a separate filter for my cricket posts, I've switched to posting them in the community usa_cricket. Right now, it's mostly reporting and discussion of cricket news, but when I get to go to some matches, I'll post match reports and scorecards there as well.  Discussion is welcome; come on over!

The tickets have been ordered, the travel arrangements made - I'm going to be in Houston from late on June 15 until early on June 20.  I'll be seeing cricket matches at the Astrodome on the 16th, 18th, and 19th; I'm at loose ends on the 17th.  Realspacing in Houston isn't out of the question; I will NOT be renting a car, however.  Wanna try to get together on that Friday?  Drop me a note, or stick your head into #Callahans on either Undernet or Freenode - but do it before the 14th of June!

dmmaus pointed out the linked CricInfo article to me. Frankly, I don't really understand why it's taken this long for anything to be said or for something like this to go public; it's been an open secret for quite some time that USACA's competence left much to be desired.  There's no real reason that cricket shouldn't be popular here; with all the players we have at the various local levels, the only real excuse is that USACA - who are responsible for promoting cricket in this country - have made NO effort that I can perceive over the past forty years to bring cricket into the public eye.  I thought that when the ICC announced their 'Project USA' and appointed someone out of England to head it up, maybe things would change - but so far, nothing has been happening.  An independent, Kal Patek, has done more for cricket in the USA just last summer (in ProCricket) than the entire USACA effort. And the various national cricket boards in other countries have been actively fighting him, too.  Hopefully, this will be a major wake-up call to USACA, and something will change - but, like NYC's Second Avenue subway, I won't believe it until I'm RIGHT THERE seeing it in the flesh.

So, last night, I went to another cricket game.  This one was a playoff game, between the New Jersey Fire and the Texas Arrowheads.

( game discussion behind the cut... )