Nassau unveils renderings of 34,000-seat cricket stadium for World Cup tournament at Eisenhower Park

Long Islanders on Thursday got their first look at renderings of a 34,000-seat temporary stadium to be built in Eisenhower Park to host part of cricket’s Men’s T20 World Cup this summer.

They show a massive circle of tiered seating around a turf playing surface covering about 30 acres near the Harry Chapin Theater.

Support facilities, like workspace for 200 members of the press and staff of 14 international television networks, will take another 50 acres, and much of the parking will be off-site, including 5,500 spaces at Nassau Coliseum, said Don Lockerbie, development director of the T20 Cricket World Cup. The Coliseum is about 2.5 miles from the park. County officials said last fall that they were also considering shuttling visitors from Nassau Community College and Mitchel Field.

Viewing areas for overflow crowds will be set up elsewhere around the county.

The venue will be used for at least eight matches from June 3 to June 12 including one between cricket powerhouses India and Pakistan and one between India and the United States, whose T20 world ranking of 23rd places it ahead of the English Channel British Crown Dependency of Jersey but behind Uganda. Eisenhower Park will stay open to the public during the tournament, said a Nassau County spokesman, Chris Boyle, in an email.

T20 is a streamlined, television-friendly format of cricket, whose traditional test matches unfold over days. Other venues for the summer tournament will be located in Broward County, Florida, Dallas, Texas and the Caribbean.

The sport's governing body, the International Cricket Council, put global television viewership for the Men’s T20 World Cup 2022 at 1.28 billion. Cricket has little network television presence in the U.S., but streams on platforms like ESPN and Willow.

Nassau County Excecutive Bruce Blakeman, speaking Thursday at a news conference at Eisenhower Park, said the sport's global following could mean a local windfall.

“This is an opportunity for Nassau County to showcase for over a billion people our beautiful park — all our parks — our beaches, health care networks, shopping, restaurants … We’re selling Nassau County as a destination,” said Blakeman, alongside business and community leaders, including Harry Singh, the Bolla gas station magnate and chair of the county’s Cricket Hospitality Committee.

The county has successfully hosted large events before, noted Blakeman, citing a Boyz II Men concert at the park last summer that drew 40,000 people. Unlike that concert, though, the tournament could have a king and multiple heads of state in attendance.

This year is the 125th anniversary of Nassau's founding and county officials will invite the heads of state of the nations participating in the tournament to watch in person, Blakeman said. That will include the king of the Netherlands, whose ancestors once claimed ownership of what is now county land. County police along with federal law enforcement partners would provide security, he said.

Nassau’s involvement came after a bid by New York City Mayor Eric Adams to build the stadium at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx stalled against opposition from elected officials, community advocates and local cricket players. That park is already a cricket hot spot, and they argued against turning over a vast swath of public land to a private entity in the middle of the local cricket season.

Most of the Nassau construction will take place between next month through May. It will use a modular seating design, employed at PGA golf and F1 racing events, that can be easily dismantled, Lockerbie said. 

John Sulinski, chief operating officer of Bay Shore sports facility firm LandTek, said his company would install the playing surface. That work has already begun: The company’s Florida affiliate recently shipped material for the cricket pitch from Australia by barge, a trip that took six weeks, he said. Workers will lay Bermuda grass sod, cut very short, on the infield, and Kentucky bluegrass on the outfield.

LandTek worked on the baseball diamond at Citi Field, multisport fields at dozens of Long Island schools and even a few amateur cricket facilities, he said, but “this is our first major league job” for cricket, Sulinski said.

George Samuel, director and head coach of the Queens United Cricket Academy, in an interview with Newsday last fall, estimated that there were between 100,000 and 150,000 cricket fans in the New York-Long Island area, with 1,000 teams playing across the region.

Some Long Island cricket enthusiasts who attended Thursday’s event said they hoped the tournament would grow the sport locally and draw interest from overseas team owners who want to enter the American sports market.

“The economic impact of this could be huge,” said Babar Zia, an engineer from Bohemia who manages the Long Island United Cricket Club. He cited a New York professional team owned by the family of Mukesh Ambanji, an Indian tycoon with a net worth pegged by Forbes at $105 billion.

“This is the type of money that could come to Long Island.”

Ajith Bhaskar, of Hicksville, president of an area league, the Commonwealth Cricket League and former board director of USA Cricket, said that amateurs play the sport at about 30 fields from Brooklyn out to Long Island but usually must bring their own equipment, including an unwieldy mat for bowling and batting.

“Parks don’t have knowledge of this,” he said.

Bhaskar said he hoped the tournament would lead to investment in dedicated fields, coaching and youth participation.

“I hope that after they leave, there’s a legacy here for us. It should not just be short-term.”

With Robert Brodsky