'Don't Call It Cricket': Ricky Ponting's Radical Idea To Promote The Sport In USA

Australian legend Ricky Ponting wants administrators to stop calling the sport cricket and instead label it ‘T20’ to promote it in the USA market, which is at the centre of the International Cricket Council (ICC)’s development plans. Ponting said the word cricket makes emerging markets like the States associate it with the ‘long, drawn-out’ Tests, instead of the more modern, fun 20-over format.

Speaking in an interview with The Athletic, Ponting admitted he was a traditionalist who played Test cricket a lot more than T20s, but would have no problem with such a rebrand to hook a new audience.

“If I was bringing it here wholly and solely to sell and promote the game, I wouldn’t call it cricket,” Ponting begins. “It’d just be rebranded as T20 only.

Leave the cricket thing aside. As soon as young people hear cricket in parts of the world where they’re not brought up on the game, they think about it being a long, drawn-out, five-day game, and it’s not that.”

“I would compare it to baseball as much as I could and give kids that chance to understand you’re hitting 15 sixes per game in a game of T20 cricket, but you are hitting less than one home run a game in the game of baseball.”

The ICC has been pushing to get the US audience on board the cricket train. American market is the biggest in the world for sports, but it’s mostly concentrated on baseball, American football, basketball, and increasingly, soccer.

Cricket is still played mostly by Asian, European, and African expats, but the ICC has tried to change that by hosting a successful 2024 T20 World Cup in the country, promoting the Major League Cricket competition (where Ponting is a coach at the Washington Freedom), and helping develop grounds for the LA 2028 Olympics.