Underdog’s Feat Is Inspiration for Cricket’s Dreamers


Editor’s note: members of NYU-Poly’s cricket team are the “cricket dreamers” in a New York Times article that follows them as they watch the Cricket World Cup. Excerpts follow.

 

Ireland beat England. This delicious upset last Wednesday has been the highlight of the Cricket World Cup, at least so far — particularly after some of the established cricket nations acted so huffily toward the inclusion of lesser teams.

Not many people in the Americas have been able to watch one of the world’s major sporting events, held in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, and pretty much confined to blurry streaming on the Web and group watching in pubs at brutal hours.

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This feat inspired the cricket team from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University — graduate students, mostly from India — who have banded together to play their sport here in the New World.

This World Cup, bloated by all those cheeky outsiders, started Feb. 19 and will end April 2. The lads from N.Y.U. Poly will gather in dormitories and apartments, have a late supper and stay awake for the first ball at 4 a.m. New York time. Good thing graduate courses are in the early evening, they say.

Yes, they root for their homeland, India for most of them but not their leading bowler, Adrian Gordon. He is from Antigua and plays for the United States, which is not among the 14 nations participating in this World Cup.

Read the full article