Cricket T20 World Cup: Top teams to play matches at Eisenhower Park

The eyes of a billion or so cricket fans now turn briefly — some would say improbably — to Long Island.

From June 3 to 12, the International Cricket Council Men’s T20 World Cup will pit the world’s top teams against each other in eight matches at the Nassau County International Cricket Stadium at Eisenhower Park in East Meadow. The stadium is one of 10 venues across the United States and the Caribbean hosting the monthlong tournament.

Built this spring and scheduled to be dismantled in the summer, the stadium will hold up to 34,000 people, some of whom will have paid $60 for standard seats, others $10,000 for luxury. The stadium’s designer said in an interview during construction that there were no bad sightlines, but a $10,000 ticket buys what a council flyer calls “the best views in the stadium,” plus perks including a “private Champagne lunch and postgame analysis with a cricketing legend.”

Long Island is not a global hotbed of the sport, but thousands of amateurs play in weekend leagues here and in New York City.

Tournament officials “expect to see upward of 20,000, 30,000 [fans] traveling into Nassau internationally” for matches, augmenting a strong domestic fan base, said Brett Jones, the tournament chief executive. 

The game that will be played — on grass imported from Florida, maintained by a groundskeeper imported from Australia — is T20 cricket, a compressed format that lasts about three hours. The name refers to 20 overs. An over is the basic unit of play in cricket, consisting of six legal balls delivered by a bowler. Each team tries to score as many runs as possible in 20 overs, so the format favors aggressive offense. In T20, now played in professional leagues across the world, teams might score hundreds of runs in a match, and power batsmen often try for fours and sixes, smacking the ball out of the field.

Each six will be marked by a “discharge of flame” from pyrotechnic devices around the field’s edge, Jones said. “It’s entertaining, it’s fast — this is all part of the T20 spectacle.”

Matches will include a flag ceremony beforehand featuring hundreds of young cricketers from the region and a DJ who will pump music between play, he said.

Teams coming to Nassau include world No. 1 India and archrival Pakistan — slated for a June 9 match — along with world No. 4 South Africa, Bangladesh, Ireland, Sri Lanka, the Netherlands, Canada and the United States. Each team will bring about 15 players, some professionals fresh from the Indian Premier League, which pays its stars millions of dollars and in 2022 sold broadcasting rights for $6.2 billion. 

India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka are previous cup winners. Their lineups, like those of most teams in the tournament, are stuffed with stars.

India, for example, will field Suryakumar Yadav and Yashasvi Jaiswa, the best and fourth-best T20 batters in the world by Cricket Council stats, along with Axar Patel, the world No. 4 bowler, and Virat Kohli, a batting great whose fame is often explained to Americans in terms of Instagram followers: 268 million, well into the Taylor Swift-osphere. 

While a tournament win will bring bonus money, what is ultimately at stake for the top players is “national honor,” said Wasim Khan, the council’s general manager of cricket, in an interview this spring. “They take this with great pride, and the World Cup is the pinnacle for them.”