USA vs Ireland Cricket: The Rivalry Rain Decided

On 14 June 2024 the United States and Ireland were scheduled to play a Twenty20 World Cup match at Central Broward Regional Park in Lauderhill, Florida. Not a single ball was bowled. It had rained in south Florida all week, the outfield was saturated by morning, and after more than three hours of inspections and delays a thunderstorm ended the argument.

The consequences were out of all proportion to the non-event. The washout gave the United States a fifth point, which secured second place in Group A behind India and a place in the Super Eights of a World Cup the country was co-hosting. It eliminated Ireland. It also eliminated Pakistan, a side that had reached the previous final. Two Full Members went home because a match involving neither of them could not be played in a park in Broward County.

That is a fair summary of the whole USA-Ireland relationship: a small number of fixtures, spaced across half a century, several of them shaped by weather, administration or a cancelled schedule rather than by cricket. It has none of the continuity of the American fixture against Canada, and none of the volume. What it has instead is a set of matches that each mattered disproportionately, and a running comparison between two associate-era programmes that ended up in very different places.

The Victorian tours that do not count

Irish sides did visit North America in the nineteenth century, and often. The Gentlemen of Ireland toured in 1879, again in 1888, then in 1892 and 1909, and on each visit the serious opposition was the Gentlemen of Philadelphia, who were at the time the strongest cricket team in the United States by a distance. The 1879 visit produced two matches against Philadelphia and one win each.

These were genuine contests between the best cricketers each side could raise, and they matter to the history of both countries. They were not, however, matches between national teams as the term is now used — the Gentlemen of Ireland were a representative invitation side, and Philadelphia was a city rather than a country. Anyone tracing the origins of Irish cricket will find that period covered in the guide to the origins of cricket in Ireland.

Griffith Park, 1973

The first meeting the two boards recognise as an official international came in 1973, in Los Angeles, and it was played at Griffith Park beneath the Hollywood sign. It was a three-day match, the Irish side was captained by Alec O'Riordan, and the United States won by 42 runs.

It is worth pausing on that result. In 1973 American cricket had no professional structure, no international calendar and very little money, and it beat a touring Irish side over three days. Ireland at that stage was not yet an ICC Associate — it joined in 1993 — so the two were roughly comparable outfits. Nothing about the following fifty years was predictable from that afternoon.

Two 50-over matches, one each

After 1973 the two sides did not meet again for a quarter of a century, and when they did it was in the ICC Trophy, the qualifying tournament that then decided which non-Test nations reached the World Cup.

Meeting	Setting	Result
1973	Three-day match, Griffith Park, Los Angeles	USA by 42 runs
1997	ICC Trophy, Kuala Lumpur	Ireland by two wickets, chasing 212
2001	ICC Trophy, Toronto	USA by six wickets

Those two 50-over games are the only ones the sides have completed at that length. Ireland's win in Malaysia was a chase completed with two wickets standing; four years later in Toronto the Americans won comfortably. One each, and then nothing at fifty overs for the rest of the century's opening decades. How the United States has fared in that qualifying system since is traced in the guide to World Cup qualification history.

Four Twenty20s, all Ireland

The short format is where most of the fixture list lives, and until 2021 it was entirely one-sided. The two sides played four Twenty20 matches before that year and Ireland won all four, the last of them at Stormont in Belfast in 2015.

That run coincides exactly with Ireland's best years as an associate nation: World Cup wins over Pakistan in 2007 and England in 2011, a settled core of players around the Joyce and O'Brien brothers, and central contracts that let the best of them train full-time. The United States in the same period was in administrative crisis, with its governing body suspended by the ICC and eventually disbanded. The gap on the field reflected the gap off it, which is the subject of the guide to USA cricket governance.

Ireland's ascent ended with Full Membership in 2017 and a first Test the following year, and at that point the fixture should logically have died. Full Members do not usually schedule associates. It survived because Ireland kept playing outside the Test schedule, and because the American board had something new to offer: a home crowd.

December 2021: the series that half happened

In December 2021 Ireland travelled to Florida for what was billed, accurately, as the first time the United States had hosted a bilateral series against a Full Member. The plan was two T20 internationals and three One-Day Internationals at Central Broward Regional Park, and it was Ireland's first visit to the United States since 1973.

The two T20s were played and they were close. In the first, on 22 December, the United States made 188 for 6 with Gajanand Singh scoring 65, Barry McCarthy took four wickets for 30, and Lorcan Tucker's unbeaten 57 was not enough as Ireland finished on 162 for 6 — an American win by 26 runs, and the country's first ever T20 international victory over Ireland. The next day Ireland levelled it, making 150 with Tucker scoring 84, then holding the USA to 141 for 7 as Curtis Campher took four for 25. Nine runs, and a drawn series.

Then the ODIs collapsed. A match official tested positive for COVID-19 before the first game, rescheduling attempts failed as further cases appeared in both camps, and all three fixtures were abandoned. USA Cricket had built its budget around hosting them and absorbed a significant loss. The result is a genuine oddity: the two nations have played each other for more than fifty years and have still never completed a men's One-Day International.

The group that made the washout matter

A rained-off group game usually decides nothing. This one did, because of what the United States had already done in Group A.

The Americans opened the tournament by beating Canada in Texas. Five days later, on 6 June at Grand Prairie, they tied with Pakistan — both sides finished on 159 — and won the super over, the Americans making 18 for one and Saurabh Netravalkar conceding thirteen when he bowled it. Monank Patel, the American captain, was named player of the match. It remains the most consequential result in the country's cricket history, and it is described in more detail in the 2024 T20 World Cup guide.

By the time Ireland was due in Lauderhill the United States had four points and needed only one more. Pakistan, having lost to both India and the USA, needed the Americans to lose. Ireland needed a win. The rain gave the point to the side that needed a point, and the arithmetic did the rest.

There is a reasonable argument that a tournament should not distribute Super Eight places by weather, and it was made loudly in June 2024. There is also a less comfortable counter-argument: the United States had already beaten a former finalist on the field, and the washout confirmed a qualification it had largely earned. Both readings were in circulation within an hour of the abandonment, and both have merit.

The players the fixture belongs to

For so few completed matches, the individual performances are surprisingly memorable, and they cluster in December 2021.

Lorcan Tucker had the series of his life in Florida — 57 not out in a losing cause, then 84 out of Ireland's 150 the following evening, which is close to carrying a side single-handed in a T20 international. Curtis Campher's four for 25 in the second match won it, and Barry McCarthy's four for 30 in the first was the best bowling of the series on either side. For the United States, Gajanand Singh's 65 set up the country's first T20 international win over Ireland.

Netravalkar and Patel belong to the fixture too, if indirectly. Neither got to bowl or bat against Ireland in 2024, and both were central to the reason the abandoned match mattered. It is a fitting detail for a rivalry in which the most important afternoon involved no cricket at all.

What Lauderhill has to do with all of this

Two of the three modern chapters — the 2021 series and the 2024 washout — happened at the same ground, and its characteristics explain a great deal. Central Broward Regional Park is the only purpose-built international cricket stadium in the United States, which is why the fixtures went there; south Florida in June is also subject to sustained afternoon thunderstorms and has drainage that has repeatedly failed to cope, which is why two of them did not finish.

The venue's full record, including the West Indies fixtures that first put it on the international map, is set out in the guide to Lauderhill's cricket history. The broader lesson the American game took from 2024 was about infrastructure rather than opposition: a country that wants to host needs grounds that drain, and covers, and reserve days.

Ireland as the case study American administrators actually use

The reason this fixture gets written about more than its ten-or-so matches justify is that Ireland is the closest thing the United States has to a worked example.

Ireland spent roughly twenty-five years going from new Associate Member to Test nation. It did so with a small playing population, no franchise league, and revenue that depended heavily on beating larger sides in World Cups. It built a provincial structure — Leinster, Northern Knights, Munster Reds, North West Warriors — to give its contracted players competitive cricket at home, and it treated its national team as the product.

The American route is close to the opposite. It has a professional franchise competition financed by outside investors, a much larger population to recruit from, and a national side that has so far been assembled from that pool rather than developed through it. The argument about whether the franchise-first model will produce international results, or whether the country needs Ireland's patient provincial approach, runs through the guides to the domestic player pathway and the economics of American cricket.

Neither model has settled the question. Ireland's Test record has been thin, and its qualification for global tournaments has become harder rather than easier since promotion. The United States reached a Super Eights without a functioning domestic first-class structure at all. Both facts sit awkwardly with the theories usually attached to them, and the honest position is that nobody yet knows which route works. Ireland's own long climb is described in the history of Irish cricket.

Where the fixture stands

There is no established series, no trophy and no fixed cycle. What exists is mutual usefulness: Ireland needs matches outside a Full Member calendar that gives it very few, and the United States needs opposition above its own level and can now offer venues and, occasionally, a crowd.

The most likely settings for future meetings are global tournaments and qualifying events rather than bilateral tours, because that is where funding attaches. If the two do arrange another series, the sensible reading of the past is that it should not be scheduled for Florida in the wet season. For the current shape of the American side, see the guide to the United States national team; for the tournament that made all of this visible, see the 2024 T20 World Cup in the USA; and for everything else the American game is building, start at the cricket in the USA hub.

Sources and method

This page draws on Cricket Ireland and USA Cricket media releases for the 2021 tour and its cancellations, official tournament records and ICC match reports for the 2024 men's T20 World Cup group stage, published ICC Trophy records for the 1997 and 2001 meetings, and Cricket Ireland's own account of the 1973 three-day match in Los Angeles. Nineteenth-century Irish tours of North America are described from published tour records; those matches were played by representative sides rather than national teams and are not counted in any head-to-head total here. Where a fixture count would change with the next match played, it is described rather than fixed. No figure in this article is computed from our own datasets.