Cricket in New York: From 1751 to Eisenhower Park

The first cricket match documented in what became the United States was played in Manhattan in 1751, and a New York newspaper had already carried an advertisement looking for cricketers in 1739. In 1844 a ground near what is now 30th Street and Broadway staged the first international match in the sport's history. In 1872 a club was incorporated on Staten Island that has been playing continuously ever since.

Then, in the summer of 2024, New York built a cricket stadium seating 34,000 people in a Long Island park, used it for eight matches over ten days, and took it apart again.

Both halves of that story are characteristically New York. The city has the longest and best-documented cricket history in the country and almost no permanent infrastructure to show for it. Its clubs play on public parkland in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. Its professional franchise carries the city's name and has spent most of its existence playing elsewhere. It has hosted the largest cricket crowds ever assembled in America and it does not have a cricket ground a visitor could reliably watch a match at next weekend.

The colonial and Victorian city

Cricket in New York predates every American team sport that now dominates it. The 1751 Manhattan fixture is the earliest documented match in the country, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the St George's Cricket Club was well enough established to host Canada in what is now recognised as cricket's first international — a fixture described in the guide to the USA-Canada rivalry.

What happened next is the central fact of American sporting history and it happened largely in New York: baseball, a faster and cheaper game requiring less ground preparation and less time, took the audience and the players. Cricket did not vanish from the city, but it stopped being the default. The long arc of that decline and the eventual revival is traced in the guide to USA cricket players through history.

Staten Island, 1872

The most remarkable survival is the Staten Island Cricket Club, incorporated on 22 March 1872 as the Staten Island Cricket and Base Ball Club — the two sports still in one organisation's name, which tells you where the century was heading. The club played on the flats at St George from the 1860s to the 1880s and now plays at Walker Park in Livingston, a ground that opened in 1931, with a Tudor-style clubhouse dating from 1934 on Bard Avenue.

The club describes itself as the oldest cricket club in the United States in continuous use since its founding, which is a carefully worded claim and a defensible one. Its other historical distinction is not cricket at all: Mary Outerbridge introduced lawn tennis to the club in 1874, and the first national tennis tournament in America was held on the ground on 1 September 1880. Donald Bradman, Everton Weekes and Garry Sobers have all played there.

The club still competes in the New York Metropolitan and District Association league. A working cricket club in its third century, on a New York City ground, is the single most underrated fact in American cricket.

Van Cortlandt Park and the borough leagues

The functional centre of New York club cricket is public parkland, and the Bronx does most of the work. Cricket fields were laid out in Van Cortlandt Park in 1938, and the park's flat expanse has carried the city's league cricket ever since, alongside grounds in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.

The playing population is heavily West Indian and South Asian, in that historical order — Caribbean migration to New York long predates the South Asian arrivals of the 1980s onwards, and the older clubs reflect it. That mix gives New York club cricket a different character from the tech-belt leagues: more fast bowling, older clubs, deeper institutional memory, and league structures that have existed for decades rather than years.

The constraint is not interest. It is land. A cricket ground needs a large flat rectangle, and New York City has the most expensive flat rectangles in the country. Every borough league is negotiating for permit time on fields that soccer, softball and cricket all want, and no amount of participation growth creates new acreage.

Citi Field, 2015

Before professional cricket had any American structure, New York hosted the game's most successful attempt at an exhibition. In November 2015 Sachin Tendulkar and Shane Warne assembled two teams of retired internationals — Sachin's Blasters and Warne's Warriors, picked by draw at Times Square — and played three Twenty20 matches in baseball stadiums.

The first was at Citi Field in Queens on 7 November and drew 36,843 people. The series moved to Houston and Los Angeles, Warne's side won all three matches, Kumar Sangakkara was the leading scorer and player of the series, and total attendance across the three games passed eighty-six thousand.

It proved something specific: a large American crowd would pay to watch cricket if the names were famous enough. It proved nothing about whether an American crowd would pay to watch American cricket, which is the harder question. The general problem of putting cricket into stadiums built for other sports is examined in the guide to cricket in baseball stadiums.

Eisenhower Park: a stadium that lasted twelve days

The 2024 men's T20 World Cup produced the most audacious venue in the sport's recent history. At Eisenhower Park in East Meadow, Nassau County, on Long Island, a temporary 34,000-seat cricket stadium was designed by Populous and built from January 2024, opening on 1 June.

The pitches were the extraordinary part. Ten drop-in trays were used; six of them were prepared in Adelaide, in consultation with the Adelaide Oval's own groundsman, and shipped to the United States, where they were moved to Long Island by road under protective blankets. The squares used Tahoma bermudagrass; the outfield was Kentucky bluegrass. Four more trays were built locally.

The cricket that resulted was extreme. The first match, South Africa against Sri Lanka on 3 June, produced Sri Lanka's lowest total in Twenty20 internationals, and the surfaces were criticised immediately for uneven and high bounce while the thick outfield slowed the ball to a crawl. Remedial work between matches — filling cracks, smoothing the surface — visibly improved things later in the schedule.

Date	Fixture	Result
3 June	South Africa v Sri Lanka	South Africa by six wickets
5 June	India v Ireland	India by eight wickets
7 June	Canada v Ireland	Canada by 12 runs
8 June	South Africa v Netherlands	South Africa by four wickets
9 June	India v Pakistan	India by six runs, attendance 34,028
10 June	South Africa v Bangladesh	South Africa by four runs
11 June	Pakistan v Canada	Pakistan by seven wickets
12 June	India v United States	India by seven wickets

India against Pakistan on 9 June drew 34,028 people, reported as the largest crowd for an international cricket match in the United States. Three days later the tournament left, and the grandstands came down. The ground was retained as a legacy cricket facility, but the natural-turf drop-in square was replaced with artificial turf, which is cheaper to keep and a considerably lesser thing. What was left behind, and what it was worth, is assessed in the guide to the Nassau County stadium legacy; the tournament as a whole is covered in the 2024 T20 World Cup in the USA, and the engineering approach in modular cricket stadiums.

MI New York, and a home ground that does not exist yet

New York has the most successful franchise in Major League Cricket. MI New York was founded in June 2023 as one of the competition's six original teams, owned by Indiawin Sports — the Mumbai Indians ownership group, part of the Ambani business empire, which also runs franchises in India, South Africa and the UAE.

It won the inaugural MLC title in 2023, beating the Seattle Orcas in the final, reached the semi-finals in 2024, and won the championship again in 2025. Two titles in three seasons is the best record in the competition.

Its stated home is Marine Park Cricket Stadium in Brooklyn — a facility that has not been delivered at the scale a franchise season requires, which is why the team's cricket has largely been played at the league's Texas and North Carolina venues. A New York franchise winning national titles without a New York ground is the sharpest illustration available of the city's problem. The ownership structures behind the league are set out in MLC teams and owners, and the competition itself in Major League Cricket explained.

Beneath that tier, the city fields a Minor League Cricket side — the New York City Titans, previously the Empire State Titans — and other metropolitan-area franchises have used grounds in Queens and Brooklyn. The tier's purpose is explained in the Minor League Cricket guide.

The permit economy

It is worth being concrete about what limits cricket in New York, because it is not the thing outsiders assume.

The city does not lack cricketers, coaches or organisers. It lacks bookable ground time. A borough cricket club does not own its ground; it applies for seasonal permits on city parkland, competes for those permits with every other field sport, and gets a fixed number of hours in a fixed set of slots. If a league wants to add a division, it cannot simply recruit more clubs — it needs the parks department to allocate more field time, on grass that is already carrying several sports a week.

That has three consequences a visitor notices. Matches start early and run to hard finish times, because the next permit holder is waiting. Formats are short, because a full-length game does not fit a permit window. And squares are artificial or matted rather than turf, because a natural cricket square cannot survive being shared with soccer and cannot be maintained by a club that does not control the ground.

None of this is solved by professional cricket arriving, and it is why the most valuable thing anyone could build in New York cricket is not a stadium but a few dedicated grounds that clubs control.

Watching and playing here

For a spectator, New York is frustrating. The city has hosted the two largest cricket crowds in American history and offers no regular professional fixture. What it does offer is club cricket on public grounds through the summer, free to watch, at a standard that is often better than the setting suggests.

For a player, the entry route is a borough league club, and the leagues are long-established enough to be genuinely competitive. Expect artificial strips, shared outfields and permit-dependent scheduling. Expect also to be playing alongside people who learned the game in Georgetown, Kingston, Karachi and Chennai, which is an education in itself.

The metropolitan cricket scene does not stop at the state line, and a great deal of it happens across the Hudson — the guide to cricket in New Jersey covers that half. For the country's grounds and how New York's compare, see cricket grounds and stadiums in the USA, and for the wider national picture, the cricket in the USA hub.

Sources and method

This page draws on published histories of early American cricket for the 1739 advertisement and the 1751 Manhattan match, the Staten Island Cricket Club's own records for its incorporation date, grounds and tennis history, New York City parks records for Van Cortlandt Park, official match and attendance records for the 2015 exhibition series and the 2024 men's T20 World Cup fixtures at Eisenhower Park, and Major League Cricket announcements for MI New York's ownership, titles and stated home venue. The 34,028 attendance figure is as reported for that fixture; the 2015 Citi Field figure was for an exhibition rather than an international, and the two are not directly comparable. League and club counts across the five boroughs change every season and are described rather than counted. No figure here is computed from our own datasets.