Cricket’s California Showdown at Oakland Coliseum

On Saturday, June 14, San Francisco resident Elizabeth Ortiz rocked up to the Oakland Coliseum with her parents, Diane and Sal, who were visiting from Southern California. The three had tickets to a game about which they knew nothing.

“We went to the Roots game, and we heard about the cricket games coming here,” said Elizabeth. Her curiosity piqued, and she asked her parents if they wanted to go and see a Major League Cricket game.

“I said, we’ve never been, so let’s do it! It’s going to be fun, and we’re excited to experience it,” said her father, Sal.

The people behind America’s premier domestic cricket tournament, the Major League Cricket (MLC) hope that the game will make inroads to attracting new fans like the Ortizes. Bringing it to new venues like the Oakland Coliseum will help.

Cricket Comes to Oakland

If there was one place where cricket could succeed anywhere in the United States, it would probably be the Bay Area. The region boasts favorable weather conditions year-round, multiple cricket academies that nourish the sport at the grassroots level, and a ready fan base in the South Asian diaspora. Access to tech and venture capitalist money could propel the game into the wider American consciousness.

“With the San Francisco Unicorns already established and the Oakland Coliseum becoming available, the opportunity made sense,” said Anurag Jain, co-owner of Major League Cricket and the Texas Super Kings team. Growing up in Chennai, he was a cricket fan and a fast bowler himself, before moving to the Bay Area for a career in healthcare tech. Now a resident of Texas, he describes bringing the MLC to the Bay Area as a ‘full-circle’ moment.

Before the 2025 season, MLC games were hosted at venues in Texas, North Carolina, and Florida. But earlier this year, when Bay Area baseball stalwarts Athletics departed from Oakland, it opened the doors for MLC to host the first nine games of the season there.

The multi-purpose stadium was built for both football and baseball games, and is known to have one of the larger foul areas among baseball venues; transforming the green to host a cricket game seemed a feasible experiment.

Apart from the outfield, an important element is the pitch — a 22-yard strip of prepared grass on which the sport is played. In 2024, when New York hosted the ICC World T20 World Cup games, a prepared pitch was transplanted from Australia to the Nassau County International Stadium. The same ‘drop-in’ pitch was transported to Oakland for the season openers of the MLC this year. During that tournament, the pitch came under scrutiny for being a difficult wicket to score on, but the high scores in the first few games here suggest it is playing truer than it was last year.

“Expanding to new venues was a priority,” said Jain. “We had been laying the groundwork to ensure strong infrastructure and long-term growth, so everything aligned to add another key venue.”

A Breeding Ground for Grassroots Talent

Hemant Buch, founder-director of California Cricket Academy, believes that the Bay Area is burgeoning with cricket talent. His academy is one of the oldest and most established in the Bay Area, with a presence in eight cities across the region. In the lead up to this season, the San Francisco Unicorns even used some of his practice facilities to train locally. He said that last year’s T20 World Cup, especially the blockbuster India-Pakistan match in New York, and now the MLC have generated great interest in the sport.

“When we started in 2003, we were the only ones for about five to six years,” he said. “We now have a USA Cricket Hub Tournament, which is contested between all the academies of the Bay Area and the Sacramento region, and we have twenty teams in the Under-13 and Under-15 categories and around 30 teams in the Under-11 bracket.”

“The growth is tremendous, especially among the youth.”

Many of the fans who came to watch the game echoed Buch’s sentiment that the development of grassroots cricket talent will pave the way for the sport’s growth in the United States.

“My son is seven and a half years old, and he already plays at a club where there’s 300 other players,” said Pushkar Raste, a Tri-Valley resident who is turning to cricket because of his son’s interest in the sport.

Another local fan, Sameer Marella, said that while his loyalties lie with the Unicorns, he is also supporting the Knight Riders with which his children’s cricket coach is associated. Buch’s longtime student
Rahul Jariwala
is also playing in the MLC, as part of the Seattle Orcas’ squad.

Two other fans at the stadium were repping the Marin Cricket Club at the game, joking that the Washington Freedom had poached star USA pacer
Saurabh Netravlkar
from their club. In the Unicorns’ squad, star batter
Sanjay Krishnamurthi is a local too
, balancing his studies at San Jose State University alongside his tryst with cricket stardom through the MLC.

Cricket fan Harish — the father of a young local cricketer — also believes that the league will grow “as long as the money flows into the grassroots, because you want to get the local-born players interested in the game.”

Unicorns For The Win

On June 14, in the blazing afternoon sun, the Los Angeles Knight Riders sent the Unicorns in to bat first after winning the toss. Massive cheers greeted openers Tim Seifert and Finn Allen, both from New Zealand. Seifert fell early, bringing Australian phenom Jake Fraser McGurk to the crease.

Allen picked up from where he left off a couple days earlier, when he played a monster knock against defending champions Washington Freedom. He got off the mark on his third delivery by casually dispatching the ball over long-on for a six. The partnership between the two motored along till the fourth over, when Fraser-McGurk cut loose, hitting American bowler Shadley van Schalkwyk for four sixes off four consecutive balls.

Allen and Fraser-McGurk routinely found the boundary till the tenth over, when the former fell prey to the wily Sunil Narine after a rapid half-century. Local lad Sanjay Krishnamurthi was looking in fine touch after two boundaries but fell to a slower ball in the next over.

Fraser-McGurk hit four more sixes, taking his tally to 11 for the innings before falling in the 14th over for 88 off 38 balls. The Unicorns were looking good for a 220+ total, but a mini-collapse meant that the innings never took off. Haris Rauf’s lusty blows took the Unicorns to 219/8, still a mighty score.

In the second innings, Knight Riders opener Alex Hales holed out to cover in the second over, bringing former Indian U-19 World Cup-winning captain Unmukt Chand to the crease. A longtime Bay Area resident, the Coliseum is a home venue for Chand, too. After a sedate start, he eventually settled into his innings. He scored 18 off Rauf’s first over, albeit eight of those came off chancy boundaries. But Rauf would have the last laugh when he returned in the 13th over. A well-disguised slower ball caught Chand by surprise as he holed out in the deep, after a well-compiled 53 off 32 balls.

Loud cheers and applause greeted the big Jamaican Andre “DreRuss” Russell; if his team had any chance of winning, he would have to score big. But Rauf had other plans, sending down a searing full delivery that crashed through Russell’s defences and bowled him for a duck. Despite an entertaining hand from Captain Sunil Narine, the Knight Riders never came close to challenging the Unicorns’ total; the home team trumped the Knight Riders by 32 runs in the MLC’s California Derby in front of a sizable crowd of over 7,300 at the Coliseum.

The Way Ahead

While the league has already attracted elite international cricketers like Russell, Narine, and Fraser-McGurk, snagging some star Indian players could put more diaspora fans in the stadium.

“We don’t get that chance to go to India to see the IPL, so we’re definitely excited to see more Indian players come as the tournament gets bigger every year,” said Raste, a Gujarat Titans fan in the IPL.

Administratively, Buch believes that there needs to be more synergy between USA Cricket and the MLC. Right now, the league functions as an independent tournament sanctioned by USA Cricket, the highest cricket administrative body in the country.

“If you look at the BCCI (Board of Cricket Control in India), that’s the controlling body, and there’s an IPL committee within it,” said Buch. “They [USA Cricket and MLC] are working independently, which I think is not a very good idea.”

He believes that the MLC’s Coliseum debut will boost the league’s popularity here, because local fans can learn about local talent and come out to support them at games.

“There were talks initially when Major League Cricket was starting that we might have a game here,” said Unmukt Chand in his post-match press conference. “It’s good to see that in three years’ time, we’re already here… hopefully, we’ll have more venues popping up and cricket can go everywhere.”

From Oakland, the MLC season moves on to Dallas on June 20, followed by Lauderhill in Florida — another new venue introduced this year — before returning to Dallas for the playoffs. But likely, the Bay Area has not seen the last of the MLC.

“We certainly hope to return next season. It takes a lot to get the pitch in so we definitely want to use it again,” said Jain. “Also, the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics will include cricket, so there may be more pitches in California for the Olympics.”

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Cricket’s California Derby At The Oakland Coliseum
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