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AMERICAN CRICKET FOUND A STAR. HE’S A SILICON VALLEY TECH WORKER.

Saurabh Netravalkar is part of a group of South Asian immigrants, many of them
tech workers, who are fueling cricket’s growth in the United States.

By Pranshu Verma
June 12, 2024 at 6:05 a.m. EDT

Saurabh Netravalkar has been a breakout star of the T20 World Cup cricket
tournament. (Yuvraj Khanna for The Washington Post)

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Saurabh Netravalkar finds it hard to log off Slack. But a few weeks ago, the
Oracle software engineer shipped his final code and set an out-of-office note on
the messaging app to focus on a more personal goal: playing for the United
States’ underdog cricket team at the T20 World Cup.



“If there is anything urgent, my manager should be able to reach me,” he said in
an interview with The Washington Post. “But I’m completely focused on the World
Cup.”

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A starter on Team USA, Netravalkar has been a breakout star of the tournament.
When the United States faced the cricket titan Pakistan last week, Netravalkar
led the team to a shocking win by bowling in overtime. The achievement
catapulted him to sudden fame and has provided the sport a crucial marketing
tool: a story to capture Americans’ attention.

Fans have posted that Netravalkar introduced them to the sport and the scrappy
American team “made up of dudes who play cricket as a hobby,” as one user posted
on Threads. Screenshots of his LinkedIn profile spread across X, earning more
than 21 million views and 60,000 likes. Others joke that the 32-year-old, who
was born in Mumbai and is in the United States on a green card, has made it
harder for immigrant children to get respect from demanding parents.



“WhatsApp desi uncles and aunties have a new standard,” one person wrote on
Threads. “Are you software engineer at Oracle and play for the U.S. cricket
team?”

But the ukulele-playing software architect faces steep odds in persuading a
nation, which knows very little about the sport, to care.

In India and Pakistan, professional cricketers are household names who command
millions playing full time. Meanwhile, Netravalkar has long balanced cricket
with a 9-to-5 coding career, playing at night and on weekends in amateur leagues
— along with other Team USA players who hold down day jobs.

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There are signs of a turnaround, with roughly 200,000 people participating in
the sport in the United States, according to USA Cricket. For the first time the
United States and the West Indies are hosting the T20 World Cup, a tournament of
20 teams that play a truncated form of the sport.




And immigrants from cricket-loving nations, often South Asians working in the
technology industry, are championing the sport. Satya Nadella, the Indian-born
chief executive of Microsoft, co-founded an American professional cricket
association, Major League Cricket. Four of the six teams in Major League Cricket
are co-owned by South Asians who made their riches in technology. Peer into the
stands of American games and you’ll find people from India, Pakistan and
Bangladesh, many of them tech workers, U.S. cricket executives said.

“If it ends up being a sport that is only for the diaspora,” cricket won’t
flourish in America, said Soma Somasegar, an investor in Major League Cricket
who worked for 27 years at Microsoft and oversaw its developer division.

“You need people … who can capture the attention of media, and by extension,
reach a broader population to kindle their interest — and over time their
inspiration,” he added.

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‘NEVER EXPECTED TO PLAY CRICKET AGAIN’

As a teen, Netravalkar showed skill. The Mumbai native was named one of the top
junior cricket players in India, but he never made the cut for the national
team.

Feeling discouraged, he tapped into another skill: coding. Armed with an
undergraduate degree from India in engineering, he started pursuing a master’s
degree in computer science at Cornell University in 2015. “I never expected to
play cricket again,” he said.



But at Cornell, students played cricket all over campus. Though he brought no
equipment with him from India, he started playing for Cornell’s club team.

He graduated in 2016 and relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area to work for
Oracle. In California, the itch to play cricket became stronger. Despite working
long hours as a junior coder, he would play club games in San Francisco.

When he learned that Los Angeles cricketers played on grass pitches (fields)
rather than the synthetic turf popular in the Bay Area, he started making the
six-hour drive on the weekends for games. Friends on the U.S. national team
suggested he try out. In 2018, he made Team USA.

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At first, his training and playing schedule wasn’t too taxing. But two to three
years ago, he said, the pace picked up, requiring him to be gone from San
Francisco five to six months at a time. He had made arrangements with work to be
remote, but he fit it in at all hours of the day — working during the early
mornings, at practice breaks or at night if facing a pressing deadline.

Oracle granted him time off for the T20 World Cup. After his win last week, the
company capitalized on his attention. “Congrats @USACricket on a historic
result!” Oracle posted on X. “Proud of the team and our very own engineering and
cricket star.”


‘YOU NEED PEOPLE LIKE THAT’

Attempts to bring cricket to U.S. audiences have been stymied by the grueling
length of the game, cricket experts said. Cricket matches are historically drawn
out over five days, or played in marathon one-day games that take roughly eight
hours to complete.

But officials argue that the T20 format, a shorter form of cricket that can be
completed in three to four hours, has a chance of drawing the masses in the
United States.

“It’s hard to imagine that people could be excited about spending five days …
[or] one day to watch a game,” Somasegar said. “So we had to find the format
that fit the audience.”

The other ingredient is migration. Some South Asians who immigrated to the
United States in the late 1990s and early 2000s have made money in the tech
industry. Buttressed by a deep nostalgia for cricket — and with an eye toward
potential profits — tech executives have poured millions into bringing the
second-most-watched sport in the world to the country.

In 2022, South Asian tech leaders such as Microsoft’s Nadella, Adobe’s chief
executive Shantanu Narayen and Anand Rajaraman, the former director of
technology at Amazon, raised $120 million to start Major League Cricket. Its six
teams play in cities such as Washington, New York City and Seattle. (Amazon
founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)




Somasegar notes that it took over 20 years for soccer to grow from obscure to
mainstream in the United States, and cricket could take even longer. His
ambitions for the game are not purely nostalgic — he’s chasing potentially
lucrative deals. To interest major streaming services, cricket’s target audience
in the United States may need to at least double, reaching a market of 10
million households, Somasegar said.

He hopes that stories of players, such as Netravalkar’s, spark interest for
people who know little about the sport. “When I’m sitting in middle school, I
need to know that cricket is a choice for me as a kid,” he added.

Netravalkar is now focused on a new obstacle: a Wednesday match against India,
the world’s top-ranked T20 cricket team. But that team is stacked with players
he grew up with, so he sees the game as an opportunity to see if he can measure
up.

Netravalkar is off work until June 16. But if Team USA advances into the next
stage of the tournament, he will have to ask his bosses for more time off.

“Taking it one step at [a] time,” he said. “Let’s see.”

Shira Ovide contributed to this report.

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