TJ Cawley is having none of it. Cricket, a sport supposedly too complex for homegrown Americans like him to fully grasp, is rather simple, he insists. “Catch the ball if it comes to you, throw it in towards the nearest wicket,” is the small-town mayor’s precis of the 42 laws that govern the centuries-old game he has taken to playing recreationally. When batting, he instructs, “hit it, and if the other person is running at you, run”.
At least a billion dollars is riding on this carefree and infectious embrace of cricket — once far more popular than baseball in the US — spreading across the world’s largest sports market this summer. In the past three weeks, stars including England’s Jason Roy, Australia’s Aaron Finch and Afghanistan’s Rashid Khan have been paid six-figure sums to descend on Cawley’s town of Morrisville, North Carolina, population 31,000, and on a suburb of Dallas, Texas, for the inaugural season of Major League Cricket (MLC). It is the first serious attempt in decades to revive the game in North America.
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