EAST MEADOW, N.Y.: A towering stadium boasting 34,000 seats and a precisely trimmed field of soft Kentucky bluegrass is rising in a suburban New York park that will host one of the world’s top cricket tournaments next month.

But on a recent Saturday morning, on the other side of Long Island’s Eisenhower Park, budding young cricketers were already busy batting, bowling and fielding on a makeshift pitch.

The T20 World Cup will be the first major international cricket competition in the US, but the centuries-old English game has been flourishing in the far-flung corners of metro New York for years, fueled by steady waves of South Asian and Caribbean immigration. 

Each spring, parks from the Bronx and Queens to Long Island and New Jersey come alive with recreational leagues hosting weekend competitions.

American cricket organizers hope the June competition will take the sport’s popularity to the next level, providing the kind of lasting boost across generations and cultures that soccer enjoyed when the US hosted its first FIFA World Cup in 1994. 

On Wednesday, retired Olympic sprinter Usain Bolt, an honorary ambassador of the T20 World Cup, visited the nearly complete Eisenhower stadium, along with members of the US cricket squad and former New York football and basketball greats.

Parmanand Sarju, founder of the Long Island Youth Cricket Academy that hosted Saturday’s practice, said he’s “beyond joyful” to see the new stadium rising atop the ball field where his youth academy began, a sign of how far things have come.

“When we started more than a decade ago, there was no understanding of cricket, at least at the youth level,” said the Merrick resident, who started the academy to teach his two American-born children the sport he grew up playing in Guyana in South America. “Now they’re building a stadium here.”

The sport originally took root in the outer boroughs of New York City but has gradually spread as immigrant families, like generations before, moved to the suburbs, transforming communities, said Ahmad Chohan, a Pakistan native who is the president of the New York Police Department’s cricket club, which also plays in Eisenhower as part of a statewide league with roughly 70 teams.

The World Cup, he said, is a “historic moment.”

Cricket is the second most-viewed sport in the world after soccer — India star Virat Kohli has 268 million Instagram followers — but it is only played by more than 200,000 Americans nationwide across more than 400 local leagues, according to USA Cricket, which oversees the men’s national cricket team.

Major League Cricket launched last year in the US with six professional T20 teams, including a New York franchise that, for now, plays some games at a Dallas-area stadium also hosting World Cup matches.

Venu Pisike, the chairman of USA Cricket, believes the T20 World Cup — the first time the US has competed in the tournament — will mark a turning point.

The sport is among those slated for the 2028 summer Olympics in Los Angeles — its first appearance at the games in more than a century, he noted. The International Cricket Council, the sport’s governing body, has also committed to growing the US market.

“Cricket is predominantly viewed as an expat sport, but things will look very different in the next 10, 20 years,” said Pisike. “Americans will definitely change their mindset and approach in terms of developing cricket.”

Both the Los Angeles games and the upcoming World Cup, which the US is co-hosting with the West Indies, will feature a modern variant of the game known as “Twenty20” that lasts around three hours and is highlighted by aggressive batters swinging away for homerun-like “sixes.” 

It’s considered more approachable to casual fans than traditional formats, which can last one to five days when batters typically take a more cautious approach. Twenty20 is the format used in the hugely popular Indian Premier League.

Eisenhower Park will host half the games played in the US, including a headlining clash of cricket titans Pakistan and India on June 9.

Other matches in the 55-game, 20-nation tournament that kicks off June 1 will be played on existing cricket fields in Texas and Florida. Later rounds take place in Antigua, Trinidad and other Caribbean nations, with the final in Barbados on June 29.

Cricket has a long history in the US and New York, in particular.

The sport was played by American troops during the Revolutionary War, and the first international match was held in Manhattan between the city’s St. George’s Cricket Club and Canada in 1844, according to Stephen Holroyd, a Philadelphia-area cricket historian.

As late as 1855, New York newspapers were still devoting more coverage to cricket than baseball, but the sport remained stubbornly insular, with British-only cricket clubs hindering its growth just as baseball was taking off, he said.

By the end of World War I, cricket had largely disappeared — until immigrants from India and other former British colonies helped revive it roughly half a century later.

Anubhav Chopra, a co-founder of the Long Island Premier League, a nearly 15-year-old men’s league that plays in another local park, is among the more than 700,000 Indian Americans in the New York City area — by far the largest community of its kind in the country.

The Babylon resident has never been to a professional cricket match but has tried to share his love for the game he played growing up in New Delhi with his three American children, including his 9-year-old son who takes cricket lessons.

Chopra bought tickets to all nine games taking place at Eisenhower and is taking his wife, kids and grandparents to the June 3 match between Sri Lanka and South Africa.

“For me, cricket is life,” he said. “This as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

The dense latticework of metal rods and wood sheets that make up Eisenhower’s modular stadium will come down soon after the cup games end, but the cricket field will remain, minus the rectangular surface in the middle known as the pitch.

Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman said what’s left lays a “world-class” foundation for local cricket teams — and perhaps a future home for a professional team.

KARACHI: The Counterterrorism Department (CTD) in Pakistan’s southern Sindh province said on Thursday the Iran-backed Zainabiyoun Brigade had carried out at least 17 sectarian killings in Karachi between last September to February this year, which were previously believed to be incidents of street crime.
The US Treasury placed the Zainabiyoun Brigade on its financial blacklist in January 2019 as part of a “pressure campaign to shut down the illicit networks the (Iranian) regime uses to export terrorism and unrest across the globe.” 
Many of the group’s fighters are believed to have been recruited from Pakistan by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its Basij militia, and trained for operations in the Syrian civil war, which broke out in 2011. 
Some of the recruits have since returned to Pakistan, especially during COVID-19 pandemic closures, authorities say, prompting them to step up their crackdown on the group’s activities. Islamabad banned the group last month, saying it was a potential threat to security. 
“In the last few months of 2023 and the first few months of 2024, there was a sudden increase in targeted killings in Karachi, which initially appeared to be deaths due to resistance in street crimes,” a CTD statement released on Thursday said.
“When the CTD investigated these incidents, it was found that from September 2023 to February 2024, in addition to street crimes, there were nearly 17 sectarian targeted killings … Upon further technical and forensic investigation of the network involved, it was revealed that terrorists from the banned organization Zainabiyoun were involved in these acts of terrorism.”
The CTD said local militants belonging to the group were getting their targets, funds and other facilities from a man named Syed Hussain Mousavi alias Muslim who used one group to perform reconnaissance and another to take out targets. 
According to the CTD, sectarian killings carried out by the group had stopped in the city after two Zainabiyoun militants, Waqar Abbas and Hussain Akbar, were jailed following their arrest in a case involving the possession of illegal weapons.
Another team of sectarian killers originally from Gilgit-Baltistan had gone underground since the arrest of their accomplices, the statement said. 
In January, the CTD in Sindh said it had arrested a “trained terrorist” belonging to the Zainabiyoun Brigade in Karachi who was accused of an assassination attempt on a top Pakistani cleric.
Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani, a former Pakistan top court judge and a permanent member of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s International Islamic Fiqh Academy, narrowly escaped the assassination attempt in the port city in March 2019. The attack had killed two of Usmani’s guards and wounded a fellow religious scholar, Maulana Amir Shahabullah.
Karachi, a metropolis of 20 million that hosts the stock exchange and central bank, has for decades been beset by armed violence. 
While an armed campaign by the military, with help from police, paramilitary Rangers and intelligence agencies, against armed gangs and suspected militants in the city brought down murder rates after 2013, street crimes have been on the rise again since last year, with shooting deaths in muggings and robberies once again becoming a daily headline.