ohOne summer night in 2010 in Centerville, Ohio, the club's cricketers gathered for their Wednesday practice at Stubbs Park. One of them brought along a new player: his nephew, Ali Khan, 19, who had just arrived from his village in Attock, Pakistan. Khan had only ever played with a tape ball, but after he played his first over with the real ball, all the other players stopped to watch the second. “Everyone was thinking,” Khan recalls, “Wait a minute, who's this kid? Where's he from?” That weekend, Khan was introduced to the first team.
More than a decade later, Khan, now 33, had just finished the second of three matches against Bangladesh at Houston's Prairie View Ground in the run-up to the World Cup. The USA were leading 1-0 and one win away from their first series victory against a Test match nation, but the game was slipping away from them. Bangladesh needed just 21 with 18 balls remaining. With four wickets to go, one of them one of the world's best all-round cricketers, Shakib Al Hasan, was down for 30 not out off just 22 balls.
Khan's first ball was Shakib with an inside edge. His fourth was Yorke's lbw and his 10th ball in the final over was edged and caught by the wicketkeeper. The Americans lost 11 runs for three wickets, with only eight of those coming with the bat. The USA won by six runs. “It's a big achievement to beat a top-10 T20 team,” Khan said two days later. But he believes even bigger achievements lie ahead. The tournament begins this Saturday with an opening game against Canada in Grande Prairie.
“I'm really excited about this World Cup,” Khan said. “I believe we have the ability to beat any team. There are four first-round matches and I'm looking forward to each one.”
Whatever Khan's reason for coming to America, it wasn't cricket. “I didn't even know there was cricket in the US,” he says. But soon after his first match in Dayton, he was racing around the Midwest, playing wherever there was good action. “Me and my friend Farhan would drive from Ohio to Chicago for a weekend match, drive five hours to a 40-over match, stay the night, play the match, and then drive back because we had to work the next day.”
At the time, he was earning a living as a mobile phone salesman. These days, he earns a living playing cricket. In 2015, he was spotted by Courtney Walsh and signed to play for the Guyana Amazon Warriors in the Caribbean Premier League. After a few injury-plagued years, he was spotted again by Dwayne Bravo, who was playing in Canada, and given a second chance in the CPL with the Trinidad and Tobago Knight Riders. He did well enough to earn a chance to play in the domestic leagues of Bangladesh and Pakistan, and eventually the Indian Premier League.
He doesn't get to play much club cricket with his Dayton mates anymore. “The problem is, they play in the park, so the grass is long and you can't put your spikes on and you can't get a full run-up. As a bowler, it's a bit of a struggle. There's a lot of talent in the US, but the facilities aren't that great at the moment.” But he loves his US team, made up mostly of men who, like him, emigrated to the US and started over.
There is more talent and experience in this team than you would expect. There are a few players who were in India's Under-19 World Cup squad in 2010 and a few who have IPL experience. Two who played a fair bit of first-class cricket before moving to South Africa, one who played Under-19 cricket for Pakistan, former New Zealand Test player Corey Anderson and former Canada captain Nitish Kumar. They all have their own stories about how they ended up playing in the US. Some came because their parents wanted a better life, some came for the studies and some came for the money.
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Khan sends some of the money he earns back to his hometown of Ja'far in Pakistan, where he dreams of one day building a new cricket ground.
Cricket may not be America's sport, but there are plenty of American stories behind the team.
“That's why it's called the land of opportunity,” Khan says. “People come from all over the world for different opportunities and we all came here to play cricket. We never imagined it would happen, but here we are. And that's what makes this team special, because we have people of different nationalities, different cultures, different backgrounds playing in this tournament as one team. That's very special.”
