Ali Khan knew precisely the moment everything was about to change for the United States national cricket team.
“After beating Pakistan when I saw the headlines,” the American bowler said of his team’s seismic upset in the Men’s T20 World Cup on June 6. “ESPN and all the big news channels, getting breaking news on my phone. Usually it’s about NBA or NFL, you know? All the big sports. After the game I saw on my phone notifications popping left and right, ‘USA beat Pakistan.’”
To find a period in which cricket was treated more like a mainstream sport in the United States than in the summer of 2024, you would at least have to go back to 2004, when Google began tracking search data—the volume of search traffic for the American national cricket team in June was 20 times greater than in any other month.
Nearly a month has passed since the United States charmed the sports world by advancing out of the tournament’s group stage on home soil. The Americans beat Canada and Pakistan, lost to India, and weathered a rainout against Ireland to secure their spot among the final eight teams on short-form cricket’s biggest stage.
However, as the American team readjusts to civilian life, its stars are continuing to grapple with their accomplishments.
“It’s just a kudos to everybody in the team who’s gone through different struggles in their lives to get to the stage that we are,” bowler Saurabh Netravalkar said. “I just want to give a hats off to everybody in the team.”
The United States’s road to the tournament was hardly conventional. When it won co-hosting rights for the ‘24 competition with the West Indies, the nation had a serious dearth of regulation playing surfaces. A temporary 34,000-seat stadium in East Meadow, N.Y. was erected on the fly for the event, and used alongside existing facilities in Lauderhill, Fla. and Grand Prairie, Texas.
The team also looked different from most American national teams. The roster was full of immigrants and sons of immigrants—Netravalkar, for instance, was born in Mumbai. Batsman Aaron Jones was born in Queens to Barbadian parents. Wicket-keeper Andries Gous is from South Africa. The list goes on and on—all 15 players on the team are either first- or second-generation arrivals in the United States.
“With respect to the diversity, I think it’s a very special team that we have in terms of people from different countries sharing their different backgrounds,” Netravalkar said. “So you get to learn a lot from each other. And that’s one special thing about our team, that we have so much diversity… and we cherish each other’s cultures.”
For Khan, his Pakistani heritage gave the Americans’ crowning moment special meaning. Pakistan won the Men’s T20 World Cup in 2009, and won the sport’s flagship tournament—the Men’s Cricket World Cup—in 1992.
“It was a pretty emotional game for me,” Khan said. “You grew up in Pakistan, playing all your cricket, school, family—you still have family there. It was different emotions for me. But when I put on my USA jersey, everything was forgotten.
The arc of Khan’s career has mirrored the recent trajectory of cricket in the United States. Once a sales representative for Cricket Wireless in Ohio, he has played the game full-time since a star turn for the Trinbago Knight Riders in the 2018 Caribbean Premier League at the T20 level.
The squad is chock-full of such success stories, but a number of players retain jobs outside of cricket—none more famously than Netravalkar, a software engineer for Oracle whose Linkedin page spread far and wide during the tournament.
“I’ve received lots of congratulating messages on all different platforms like Instagram, Facebook, even the office messaging system,” Netravalkar said. “So that was heartwarming to see.”
Upon advancing to the Super 8, the Americans butted heads with even more of the sport’s Commonwealth giants—South Africa, the West Indians on home soil, and England. The United States gave a good account of itself against the South Africans before lopsided losses in their final two matches.
To Netravalkar, the lesson was apparent: professionalism is king.
“What I personally observed is there is no shortcut to getting better,” he said. “It’s just volumes—the sheer volumes that they do in practice and the sheer professionalism that they have. We need to play more competitive games against top teams… to get that experience under our belt.”
The Americans will not have to wait long for a return to the T20 international stage. Because of their performance in ‘24, the United States has already qualified for the 2026 event in India and Sri Lanka. In 2028, cricket is slated to return to the Olympic program for the first time in over a century—in Los Angeles, no less.
“We have enough years to build a strong team and be ready for it,” Netravalkar said. “Because four years is a reasonable enough time with the potential that we have. And we saw it in the World Cup right now. Even with limited resources, we can give tough competition to some good teams.”
