The Slow-Burn of American Cricket: Ricky Ponting, the Man Standing at Both Ends of the Value Chain

In September, in New York, Ricky Ponting said one sentence that reporters would later quote more than anything else he said that day. He said cricket in the United States is growing as a "slow-burn" — a low flame that does not flare. He did not say it in the voice of a man who had just failed. He said it in the voice of a man who has sat long enough by a fire to know that wet wood must be waited out.

The same week, at an indoor training facility in New York, there were green mats, taut nets, and a small device recording the bat-swing angle of a fourteen-year-old boy. The boy did not know he was being measured. He only knew that a tennis ball was coming out of a machine and that he had to hit it. The device recorded, a curve appeared on a screen, and all of it flowed into a database that could later be used for selection, or for sale. That facility belongs to Century Cricket Centres, a venture in which Ponting is an investor.

These are two ends of the same story: a man who once lifted a world championship trophy as captain of Australia now stands at the coaching bench of Washington Freedom in Major League Cricket, while holding equity at the deepest layer of the production chain — where American children first meet a sport he believes can take root here.

What is worth noting is that he never said things were going well.

From years of watching matches from the stands and from press rooms, I have learned one thing: when a well-known figure says things are slow, that is usually real information, whereas when people say things are exploding, that is usually a press release. Ponting's "slow-burn" line is the first kind of information. But it is also the kind that needs to be taken apart, because not every slowness has the same cause. There is the slowness of a sport putting down roots, and there is the slowness of a sport reassuring itself.

To tell the two apart, one has to start from where Ponting stands.

The man standing at both ends of the value chain

In football, people are used to the image of a former star becoming a coach. It is an old path, with a route and a hierarchy. Less familiar is a former star who is simultaneously a coach and a shareholder in the very ecosystem he competes in. Ponting is doing the second.

At Washington Freedom he is head coach — the person publicly responsible for results, for wins and losses, for facing the press after every defeat. At Century Cricket Centres he is an investor — a person with a financial interest in the sport expanding, in there being more players, in there being more professionals in the future. These two roles do not contradict each other, but they speak two different languages. A coach needs to win now. An investor needs the market to grow over ten years.

In the economics of sport, this structure is called vertical integration. One controls both the final product — a team competing in a professional league — and the input — a youth development facility. In Europe, the academies of big football clubs operate on a similar logic, except that there the supply has long been abundant, so an academy is a filter, not a pump. In the United States, an academy must do both jobs: pump water into the pipe and filter it.

That first indoor facility in New York, with performance-tracking technology, is not merely a decision about weather, though it also solves a weather problem. The American Northeast has long winters, and cricket is an outdoor sport. An indoor facility lets children play year-round, something baseball in the United States is also trying to solve in its own way. But the deeper meaning lies in the phrase "performance tracking." A sport that wants to professionalise quickly usually begins by measuring. Measurement creates rankings, rankings create competition, competition creates academies with fees, and fees create a new middle class of the sport. That is the road football took in Europe over the past two decades, and cricket is walking it again in America over ten years.

But there is one important difference. European football had hundreds of thousands of children playing in the streets before it had academies. Cricket in America does not yet have that base layer. This makes Ponting's vertically integrated structure both a reasonable bet and a sign that the market cannot yet run on its own.

Three seasons, three finals

In Major League Cricket, Ponting's Washington Freedom won the title in his very first season in charge, in 2026. In the two following seasons the team reached the final and lost. He described it in one short sentence, to the effect that it has not all been plain sailing.

Read the record in the ordinary way and you see a stable coach. Three seasons, three finals is a fairly high professional floor in a young league. But I want to stop on the word "floor."

A coach can achieve good results for three different reasons: because he is tactically excellent, because his squad is stronger than the rest, or because luck was evenly distributed across three consecutive seasons. The report provides no performance data to distinguish these three possibilities. No home win-rate figures, no statistics on scoring efficiency in the closing stages, no data on how the squad is rotated under a heavy schedule. Nothing resembling a process model.

That is a large gap, and it is not the writer's fault. It is the nature of a sport that has not yet been fully measured. A young league does not yet have the public data infrastructure of European football. People know who won, but not why.

The interesting thing lies elsewhere: two consecutive final defeats create a very particular kind of pressure. In a small league, losing a final is not treated as a catastrophe, but it begins to raise a question that is very hard to answer — whether this team has already hit its ceiling. With a coach whose name is bigger than the league he coaches in, that question carries further than usual, because every defeat is read through the lens of a larger career.

In football, I have seen this. A coach who once won a European title while managing a small club is always judged by the old yardstick in a new place. The pressure does not come from the table. The pressure comes from memory. And other people's memory is the one thing no coach controls.

The shot no one witnessed

If I had to pick the strongest factual point in everything Ponting said, I would not pick the 2026 title. I would pick the United States men's national team and the victory over Pakistan at a T20 World Cup played on home soil.

Pakistan has been world champion. The United States is an emerging cricket nation, without the standing of a long-established team. A win in those circumstances is not just three points. It is a statement that the gap between cricket nations is narrowing, at least in the T20 format — the shortest format, where good preparation and a few individual moments can overturn the hierarchy.

At the last two T20 World Cups, the United States team played long-established cricket nations without being overwhelmed. That is a real sporting signal, and it differs from a media signal.

But I want to keep caution here, because this is precisely the kind of fact most easily abused.

A win over a big opponent in a short format generates a very powerful storytelling effect. It lets people say cricket is rising in America, that there has been a turning point. But a single win is a sample of size one. In the T20 format, the rate of surprise is much higher than in the longer formats, because fewer deliveries decide the outcome, and because one individual playing brilliantly can settle an entire match. Such a win is evidence of potential, not evidence of a system.

I once witnessed the opposite in Kazan in 2026, when Germany lost to South Korea by an unexpected scoreline after twenty-six attempts without a goal. That night, amid a crowd of weeping Germans, no one spoke about the formation. People spoke only about the trophies sinking. An upset in football produces a different kind of memory from an upset in cricket, but human reactions are the same: people remember the moment and forget the conditions that produced it.

That is why the win over Pakistan needs to be read together with the rest of Ponting's sentence: for the sport to grow, you have to start in primary schools.

The real opponent is baseball, not England or India

In conversations about cricket in America, people usually imagine the battle is between cricket and the other Anglophone sports, or between American cricket and the traditional cricket powers. Ponting points to a different and far more practical opponent: baseball.

A child in suburban Dallas has one Saturday afternoon. He can choose baseball, basketball, football, or cricket. Of those four options, the first three have fields, have youth leagues, have television, have local heroes. What remains is an option without sufficient facilities across most of the country. This is competition at the level of supply, and it explains why Ponting talks about primary schools more than about television.

This is the point that ordinary analysis tends to miss. People talk about demand: how many Americans want to watch cricket, how many follow the professional league, how many tickets are sold. But demand already partly exists — America has a large South Asian diaspora, and that community has carried the sport with it like a mother tongue. The problem is supply: not enough grounds, not enough coaches, not enough youth leagues, not enough time in the school timetable.

This is where I want to say something from my own experience. In 2026, when the pandemic closed stadiums, I made a podcast called "Tiếng Sân Vắng" — the Sound of Empty Grounds — interviewing forgotten former players. The first was a forty-one-year-old defender who had scored an own goal in a promotion play-off. He was silent for ten minutes before saying that grass still grows over the marks of his boots. Empty grounds taught me that grass still grows, but that the roar of the crowd has become memory.

Cricket in America is at the opposite stage: there is no crowd yet, but there may not be grass either. To have grass, you must plant it in schools. That is slow work, expensive, unglamorous, and it does not generate shareable video.

The contradiction in Ponting's argument

Here an interesting tension appears, and I think it deserves to be pointed out rather than blurred.

Ponting says two things at once. First, the sport can only grow in a real sense if it starts with children, with primary schools, with winning a child's Saturday afternoon. Second, the momentum that drives the whole system will come when the national team succeeds — when the national team wins, every layer of the pyramid begins to move.

Those two statements do not technically contradict each other, but they bet on two different mechanisms. The first mechanism runs bottom-up: more children play, there are more players, the national team gets stronger. The second runs top-down: the national team is strong, children see it, children want to play, supply expands.

Sports history leans toward the first mechanism. In countries where cricket is developed, millions of children played in streets and alleys long before any national team could be called successful. In football, the small football nations that succeeded over the past two decades — Belgium, Croatia, Iceland at its peak — all built from a very specific development infrastructure, not from one big win. A big win is usually the result of twenty years of development, not its cause.

So when Ponting says that a successful national team is the moment the sport starts to grow, he is placing a reasonable but unproven belief into a market with a very particular structure. America is not Belgium. In America, the competing sport is not merely other sports; it is a sport of the same technical family. Baseball and cricket share a premise — a pitcher or bowler, a batter, and a hard ball — even if the rules differ. Being of the same family means competing directly for the same kind of skill: eye reaction, response time, wrist.

There is another tension worth stating clearly: if the national team is the catalyst, then the fact that the United States has been drawn against strong sides at recent T20 World Cups could also be harmful. One big win creates light. Many heavy defeats against those same opponents create darkness. In both cases the sport moves, but in opposite directions. A catalyst only works if results go the right way, and that cannot be bought with investment money.

The 2028 Olympics as a deadline

If I had to pick a single variable that will determine the pace of American cricket's growth, I would pick the Los Angeles Olympics of 2028 — not because a cricket match there will matter more than any other, but because it is a public, hard, non-negotiable deadline.

A deadline is a strange tool. In project management, people know that a fixed date changes the behaviour of an entire system: capital flows toward that date, media pays more attention, federations are forced to standardise selection and eligibility procedures, and sponsors appear because there is now a date to attach a brand to.

For American cricket, this is the first time such a marker has existed. Before, every development roadmap was vague in time: people said five years, ten years, one generation. A generation is a concept without a date. 2028 has one.

But a deadline is also a trap, and it is the kind of trap I have seen across many fields.

As a media milestone approaches, pressure usually concentrates on what can be seen: images, ceremonies, stadiums, the national team. Very little pressure concentrates on what cannot be seen: the number of twelve-year-olds playing cricket at least once a week, the number of certified coaches, the number of covered practice facilities in cold-winter states. If only the upper layer is built while the lower layer stays empty, the Olympic moment will amplify the slowness rather than erase it.

This is what I think Ponting understands better than most, because he stands in both layers. A coach does not need to care about the number of twelve-year-olds in Dallas. An investor in a development facility does, absolutely, because that is his market.

What does the man preaching patience get?

There is an aspect that a conventional news report will skip, but which I consider more important than anything actually said: the speaker.

A former star, now coach of a team in a professional league and simultaneously an investor in development infrastructure, has three intersecting interests when he speaks about the growth of the sport. First, as a coach, he wants his league to be seen as rising, in order to attract good players and sponsors. Second, as an investor, he wants the flow of capital into the sector to continue. Third, as a well-known individual, he wants to remain at the centre of the story.

Those three interests do not turn his statements into a lie. But they shape how he speaks.

Note the phrase "slow-burn." It is a very skilful piece of framing. If the sport grows fast, people will say his forecast was too cautious but that he was right about the direction. If the sport grows slowly, people will say he warned them in advance. In both cases, the person who set the timeline benefits. When someone simultaneously lowers expectations and holds a stake in the outcome, lowering expectations is not only honesty. It is also a strategy.

I say this not to cast doubt on him. I say it because that is the correct way to read a public statement. In sports writing, I have many times followed a player moving to a new city on a big contract, and I always ask a question that is not about ability but about position: which part of himself did this person leave behind at home, and which part was brought here to be sold? The same question applies to those who report on the growth of a new sport.

What is commendable is that Ponting says clearly that things have not been plain sailing. He does not promise. He does not say America will soon be champion. He talks about primary schools, about baseball, about having to wait. In a sports market where most messages are advertising, this caution has its own value.

The line between silence and helplessness

There is something here I have to remind myself of, because it is my own professional trap.

I am a person who likes to write about silences. I believe football, and sport generally, is most present in empty places — a ground without spectators, a shot no one witnessed, an answer swallowed back. But there is a danger in that way of seeing: it easily turns silence into a value in itself, as if silence were always depth.

The silence of American cricket is not the same kind as the silence of an empty stand during a pandemic. The empty stands of 2026 were a meaningful absence, because they showed how much the sport needs people. A shortage of youth development facilities is not a beautiful silence. It is simply a shortage.

One has to distinguish these two, otherwise a writer will romanticise a structural failure into a poetic tragedy, and the world will not move forward from it. In an earlier piece about a club academy facility in southern China, I happened to watch Vietnamese, Japanese and Chinese children in the same place; the lower layer of a development system is not a romantic place, it is a place with a registration fee board. That is as true in New York as anywhere else.

So when I reread what Ponting says about primary schools and baseball, I see something more concrete than any poetic image. I see an application form.

Every summer has its god, and every god has its price

Over years of writing about big transfers, I have learned that every new sports market passes through a similar phase: the phase in which people pay a high price for a name. Every summer has its god, and every god has its price. In China more than a decade ago, clubs paid large sums to bring in players past their peak, expecting the name to bring crowds, television, commercial disputes. Results were often mixed: a few shone, most quietly left, and what remained in the end was an academy system that had not been completed in time.

American cricket is at a similar phase, but on a different layer. Here, the name is not paid to play football; it is given a coaching position and invited to invest. That is a more refined model. Rather than paying a star to play twenty matches and leave, people invite a star to become part of the infrastructure. If all goes well, that star leaves behind a facility and a generation of trainees. If not, at least there is a name to put on a billboard.

I think that is why the detail about the indoor facility in New York matters more than it seems. It turns a media relationship into an ownership relationship. And an ownership relationship has at least one property a media relationship does not: it must be accountable after the contract ends.

We love a team the way we love a poem — not for the meaning, but for the rhythm

There was a period when I believed cricket and baseball were the same thing, seen from a distance. A pitcher, a batter, a hard ball, a stretch of grass. But seen closely, the two sports differ at exactly the point that decides a sport's growth: rhythm.

Baseball has the rhythm of long pauses and one decisive moment. T20 cricket has the rhythm of six consecutive balls per over, six short tensions, and a much higher density of action. That density is precisely why cricket has a chance to break into a saturated sports market. Americans are already used to fast, high-scoring sports with short highlights. T20 cricket speaks the same rhythmic language.

We love a team the way we love a poem — not for the meaning, but for the rhythm. If cricket wants to take root in America, it must sell the rhythm first, and the meaning afterwards.

This explains a paradox in Ponting's remarks. He talks a great deal about primary schools — that is, about meaning — while the most sellable thing about this sport in America is its rhythm: a three-hour T20 match with six climaxes, fitting every television format America has built over half a century. If the professional league wants to attract neutral viewers, it should focus on the short format. If it wants to survive another twenty years, it must go back to primary schools.

Both jobs are needed, but only one produces good images this week.

Three layers of a chain not yet closed

If I were to draw a diagram of what is happening, I would draw three layers.

The top layer is the 2028 Olympics and what comes with it: television contracts, sponsors, global attention. The middle layer is the professional league and the national team — where Ponting is coach, where the American team beat Pakistan, where Washington Freedom reached three finals in a row. The bottom layer is schools, indoor practice facilities, and twelve-year-olds who do not yet know what cricket is.

What is interesting is that these three layers are advancing at different speeds. The top layer moves fastest, because it has a deadline and capital. The middle layer moves at a medium pace, because the national team has results and the professional league has audiences but not yet depth. The bottom layer moves slowest, because planting grass does not generate news.

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. And in this case, the weakest link sits in the layer nobody wants to film.

If things go well, the bottom layer will be built with money from the top layer, and in ten years a child whose bat-swing angle was measured in New York today will be part of a national team playing at some Olympics after 2028. That is a long road, entirely possible, and entirely uncertain.

If things go badly, then by 2028 the American team will step out under the biggest lights this sport has ever had in this country, with a squad drawn largely from people who came from elsewhere, and afterwards everything will quieten down. This is the scenario sports professionals call a false peak. It happens more often than people think. Cities that host major events all know the feeling: one brilliant week, and then an empty stadium.

Takeaway

There is one moment in the interview that I consider the most important, and it is not in the most-quoted line. It is in Ponting's admission that things have not been plain sailing.

A coach can choose to stay silent. An investor can choose to say everything is fine. Ponting does the opposite: he lowers expectations publicly while continuing to stay inside the system. In an industry where most signals are noise, voluntarily turning down the volume is a meaningful act.

That does not make American cricket easier. It only makes the story more honest. And if there is one thing this sport has taught me after twenty years of writing: you cannot build a sport out of big wins. You can only build it out of Saturday afternoons that no one films.

Empty grounds taught me that grass still grows. But in New York, the grass is being planted indoors, under a roof, with measuring equipment. That is the image I will carry with me when I think of American cricket: a patch of grass that has to be grown indoors, because outdoors still belongs to another sport.

People call it sport, but I call it a manuscript that is always being rewritten.