When, on a 2020 visit to India, the then US president Donald Trump stood before a crowd of 100,000 at the Narendra Modi Stadium and butchered the name of the nation’s favourite cricketing son, the impression was not exactly of an America primed for invasion by leather and willow.
Little more than four years on from the “Soo-chin Tendul-kerr” blip, however, and as both Modi and Trump seek populist re-election, cricket is on the Stateside campaign trail, trying to woo its way into what can be a most insular sporting culture, just at the moment that the US, in turn, is establishing a growing and increasingly significant presence on the global cricketing scene.
