By Liz Clarke, Published: May 21 ..
.in the WPWith the ear-popping crack of a bat, shouts of “Shabash!” rang out on a recent Sunday afternoon at Silver Spring’s Galway Park.
“Shabash!” “Shabash!”
The Urdu word for “excellent,” shabash also is a term among cricket players worldwide — whether from India or Pakistan, England or Australia, Jamaica or Guyana — to cheer on outstanding batting, bowling and fielding, the game’s essential skills.
Among cricket’s stateside adherents, the most pressing goal at the moment is making Americans equally fluent in the world’s second-most popular sport, eclipsed only by soccer.
To most Americans, cricket is a puzzlement. Even savvy sports fans know little more than it’s traditionally played in white trousers, involves a flat wooden bat and lots of running back and forth. Fewer still realize it has a rich tradition in the United States; it predates by 140 years the national pastime of baseball, which is cricket’s direct descendant.
But cricket hotbeds exist — particularly in New York, Florida and California — spurred in the late 1970s by immigrants from the West Indies, which ruled the sport at the time. It was fueled anew as a wave of workers from south Asia arrived for the tech boom of the late-1980s and ’90s.
And it’s thriving in the Washington area: There are two cricket leagues that field more than 40 teams for nearly 2,000 weekend players.
“It represents the diversity that the D.C. area has,” says Rohit Kulkarni, 35, one of those weekend players who traveled the country researching a well-received documentary, “Pitch of Dreams: Cricket in America.”
According to Peter Della Penna, cricket is the country’s fastest -growing sport, with 15 million fans and an estimated 200,000 players. It can be found in all 50 states, including Nebraska, where the New Jersey native played club cricket as a Creighton undergraduate after falling in love with the sport while studying in Australia.
