In kaleidoscopic Houston, cricket thrives, as a first U.S. World Cup nears

“The grounds we have now, you can play every weekend, and more are still coming,” said Kishore Bandlamuri, 33, in Houston since 2018 after growing up in the Indian colossus of Hyderabad and also in a league.

Told over coffee that a visitor had mapped out 22 grounds around the behemoth city, Houston restaurant magnate, philanthropist and cricket-ground financier Tanweer Ahmed replied: “Now there are actually more. Thirty-plus now.”

All together if strewn about, they’re telling of the world’s second-biggest sport having an American budding period just as the T20 Cricket World Cup begins Saturday up next to Dallas before coursing through June in the Caribbean and the United States.

Way over east of downtown Houston in Baytown, they’re playing on grass between a football field and four baseball diamonds in front of a water park with occasional squeals from the surf slide. An hour west from that across the sprawl, in a city park in Stafford, just beyond six busy basketball hoops in a tidy pavilion, there’s a cricket tournament with a table full of trophies waiting for their various home shelves, plus the always-welcome fact that somebody has brought a large drum.

Dotting the cricket-hunt map are well-kept, world-class grounds and unkempt, unassuming fields. Sakhi Muhammad, who built Moosa Cricket Stadium in Pearland a decade back while those around him wondered about his equilibrium, notes more than 50 teams in greater Houston are “playing with the hard ball,” as used in tiptop competitions, and more than 100 “play soft-ball cricket,” using a rubber or tennis ball wrapped in electrical tape. Said Waleed Zaman, a 22-year-old whose family emigrated 12 years ago from Peshawar, Pakistan, “The growth has been immense because when I first started getting interested in [playing] cricket, there were far less teams than Houston has now.”

He notes six leagues now, one premier and five amateur, plus other “Saturday leagues” in which players might get their skills noticed.

Also there’s this: “In Houston,” Naqi said, “there’s a lot of parking-lot cricket.”

Cricket has neither dented King American Football nor siphoned off eyeballs from the Astros, and it’s easy to live in a vast city without noticing it. But as south Asian immigrants have arrived in increasing numbers and have helped fuel Houston’s dazzling diversity, the cricket grounds have joined the tapestry.

They’re right there on the boulevards and the side roads near minimarts with gas pumps or farms with horses standing around in the heat or a towing company called “All-America” or a bakery with goodies from the Indian state of Kerala or signs for election candidates or charter schools, churches, used-car sales. Or they’re out amid cropland in Wallis, way out west of the city, where six light stanchions rise along two-lane roads and occasional houses and those who play there tell of occasional fog and dew that add to cricket’s voluminous nuances.

Along one quick stretch of busy road in Sugar Land that hollers the region’s variety, there’s an Islamic center, an “Iglesia Christiana,” a Buddhist temple, an Assembly of God Church called Firebrand and then, tucked behind a stony condo complex, a handsome cricket ground.

In a park pretty well northwest of downtown Houston, a fetching scoreboard shouts a little cosmopolitanism. It stands ready to keep track of runs, overs and wickets.

About 53 sometimes-slow miles northwest of the city, the Prairie View Cricket Complex with its six pitches held highbrow matches last weekend between the United States and Bangladesh. It held a women’s tournament in April. It held a 26-team college tournament in March. It seats 10,000 and boasts a turf surface, costly to maintain but affording Ahmed “a little bit of pride” because of its standard. As Naqi put it, it’s “a proper facility” where “you can see the ball behaves differently.”

The ground and the international matches played upon it and the T20 World Cup in the United States add up to “a dream come true, to be honest with you,” said Ahmed, a Houstonian since 2007 and U.S.-based since 1988 with a herculean life story gone from childhood poverty in a village near Sialkot, Pakistan, to one of its numerous peaks in 2018 when he bought the ground’s first 14 acres. “I never thought that it will come this far. It all started with literally trying to play myself, and then all of a sudden, I decided to buy more and more land.”

Back into the city and south of its center in Pearland, Muhammad’s Moosa Stadium boasts an umpires room, a commentary box, a media center, a VIP box and more.

“The majority of my community and people in business were telling me: ‘Look, you’re doing something that’s not going to happen,’ ” said Muhammad, a Houstonian since 1996 and a native of Karachi, Pakistan. “ ‘Cricket is going nowhere.’ ” And so, “I was called a crazy guy 10 years ago.” And so now, “Sometimes not every dream comes true, but this is one that came true.” He notes that Moosa held 12 one-day international matches in 2022 alone.

At Babar Noor’s high school, the other kids know he and one other student are cricketers but can seem fuzzy on what that means precisely. On a recent Sunday, Noor carpooled from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. with four fellow players from Clear Lake, well south-southeast of downtown Houston, to Katy, well northwest. “I feel lucky,” he said of the participation, the World Cup and all of it.

“I wish there were a high school team, but it’s okay,” said Noor, 17, born in Houston to parents from Karachi. “It’s the only thing I wish there was.”

In fact, there’s a prevailing feeling of pleasant surprise among many of the players from the Sunday match in the field in Katy.

“So basically when I came [to the United States 12 years ago], my thought was: ‘Will I be playing cricket? Is it that common like it was back home in India?’ ” said Hyderabad native Nadir Husain, 35, who emigrated at 23 for his master’s degree. “To my surprise, my university [Houston Clear Lake] had a cricket team, competing at the regional and national level.”

The meaning of just landing here has changed cricket-wise.

“People who moved here 30 or 40 years ago, they wouldn’t have expected this to happen in the United States,” said Pradeep Dasu, 24, also from Hyderabad, here for three years. Now he sees “each and every country” with “their own set of players playing in Houston,” meaning especially Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans.

Sairam Mandhadi, 31, from Hyderabad and in the United States the past 18 months, said he has found more cricket available for everyday players in Houston than in India. “I feel truly blessed to be part of Houston,” he said. In fact, he stopped playing at age 22 or so, then moved to a neighborhood near the Texans’ NRG Stadium where many Indian students reside.

“That’s where I got the push again,” he said. “That is the largest reason for me to love this city. And I just feel like I’m not going anywhere else! Trust me.”

It has led him into an unexpected cricket wonderland alongside his career in IT, which often means obsessing during the week if he happens to go out in one or two or few balls in a match and gabbing on about cricket while at social functions, to the point his wife sometimes asks whether he can veer to other topics.

“Trust me, even my family members feel very bored when we get together, because all the boys will be talking about cricket,” he said.

So they’re gathering. “It’s about being together,” Bandlamuri said, “and it’s about being together also with the other team,” often with nationalities they would not have met except in this melting pot.

And they’re surveying conditions. “Sunday the grass was not cut because we just had a storm,” said Naimesh Patel, 42, in Houston since 2014 and a former U.S. military serviceman. “So that was impeding the ball. The second thing there was a crosswind the last half-hour, so I could leverage that into my bowling.”

And they’re feeling the deep-in-bones feelings such as nostalgia. “It’s a game you kind of forget about all the external because you’re so focused on the game,” Husain said. “Those two to three hours are just meant for the game, and then you come back to reality.”

Then in these coming weeks, they’re all turning toward the latest World Cup in T20, the fastest and newest of the three major forms of cricket, designed to lasso limited attention spans with its three-hour-or-so matches. Texas A&M student Samad Alnawaz, 21, born in Galveston to parents from Karachi, will go with friends to Grand Prairie, next to Dallas, for the match June 6 between the United States and Pakistan. “I’m not missing a chance to see Pakistan for the first time,” the lifelong American said.

There’s a thought-out plan in place. They will drive to Dallas-Fort Worth the night before. They will sleep some. Then, as close to dawn as allowed, they will reach the stadium, with its place next to the Lone Star horse track and its walls showing banners of the six U.S. Major League Cricket teams. They don’t want to miss the warmups.

“Going out there, seeing what they do before the match, that’s just as much fun as the match itself,” said Alnawaz, who envisions being there “maybe for eight hours straight.”

Soon after that in a faraway place — Long Island — comes another match of note.

“Just imagine on June 9 when Pakistan plays against India,” Ahmed said. “I guarantee you 1.5 billion people will be watching worldwide. Who would have thought that back in 2016 that in 2024 we would be hosting international games here? It’s incredible. It’s a very good feeling.”