#Philadelphia international cricket festival series#
By mutual agreement, Liz - a cricket fan since the 2005 Ashes series - drove. The clouds were low and there was a slight breeze - the kind of conditions you would almost certainly bowl first in. It was a warm, slightly overcast spring morning in April when we set off. So when my wife Liz and I finally got ourselves a car, one of the first priorities was to take a road trip across the East Coast, visiting cricketing landmarks, finding out the state of the game and meeting like-minded people - in particular, those admirable souls keeping cricket alive in America. He eventually gave up and left the startled studio analysts to take up the commentary.Īll that mattered was that "Popeye" Powell had reminded me how much I loved cricket. It was like cricket directed by Fellini.Īnd it didn't matter that the commentator, more at home with high-school lacrosse games, was floundering badly with an unfamiliar sport. One was permanently stationed behind third slip with the other zooming in and out of the action from somewhere in the vicinity of fine leg. It didn't matter that the camera angles were bizarre. It didn't matter that the standard was what you would see at your local park on a Saturday afternoon, as was the crowd - with players comfortably outnumbering spectators. He ended up unbeaten on 193, which included 13 sixes.
Popeye opened the batting for the Sportsmen's Athletic CC (surely an ironic name given the physical condition of several of their players) and, after a slow start, launched a Chris Gayle-like assault on the Bloomfield Caribbean bowlers (it was no surprise when the "play-by-play" guys revealed that Gayle and Popeye had formed a fearsome opening partnership for Excelsior Primary School in Jamaica back in the early '90s). The game was the Connecticut Cricket League Championship final in September 2013 and was being covered by a local public channel that is so obscure that most people are unaware of its existence. Actually, it was the only cricket I had ever seen on American TV, but that is not the point. O 'Neil "Popeye" Powell's innings was the most explosive I had ever seen on American TV.
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