Within a congested sporting summer, we might have already witnessed the most unexpected sporting moment of 2024. In what has been dubbed “one of the biggest shocks in cricket history”, the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup co-hosts USA beat Pakistan in a pulsating game on June 6. With seven runs needed off the last ball of a “super over” tiebreaker, Pakistan could only manage a single.
Few saw this coming. Pakistan has significant cricketing pedigree, including winning this tournament in 2009 and finishing runners-up in 2022. Cricket is also hardly a mainstream sport in the US. Indeed, the New York Times suggested that many Americans were “oblivious to the magnitude” of the victory.
But history suggests perhaps it should be less of surprise. After all, the first ever international cricket match took place in what is now Manhattan, with the US losing a low-scoring game to Canada in September 1844. And when the Philadelphian cricket team visited England in 1897, 1903 and 1908, they were good enough to win 12 matches against first-class counties at a time when English cricket was in its “golden age”.
