Cricket might seem out of place in this area, but Houston likes to expand globally. Becoming a cricket center helps with forging relationships with India and Pakistan, among many other nations.
Cricket’s swift rise in Houston has attracted international attention and helped make Texas the launching pad for the sport’s first American professional league, Major League Cricket, whose inaugural season began on Thursday outside Dallas.
“One of the unknown things about Houston is the diversity of the population from many cricket-playing countries,” said Tim Cork, a deputy consul general at the British consulate in Houston. “There are Indians, Pakistanis, there’s obviously a huge number of Brits here, Australian accents wherever you go.”
The number of people of Indian heritage in Texas has doubled over the last decade to a half a million, according to estimates from the Census Bureau’s annual survey, including 73,000 in Harris County, which includes Houston, and 64,000 in suburban Fort Bend County.
“When I came to this country, the only sport I knew was cricket,” said KP George, the county judge in Fort Bend, who immigrated to the U.S. from India in 1993. When he was elected in 2018, none of the county parks had a cricket field, he said. Now there are seven, and each is reserved for play months in advance.
“There’s a huge demand,” he said. “We’re working on a couple more fields.”
