SGV Connect 137 Interview: Chris Greenspon Interviews Abhimanyu Rajp
Chris Greenspon - I'm Chris Greenspon. You're listening to SGVConnect. We have with us. Abhimanyu Rajp, Director of Los Angeles Cricket and co-owner of the minor league team the Los Angeles Lashings, here to talk with us about all things cricket in the 2028 Olympics. Abhi, can you tell us a little bit about your organization first?
Abhimanyu Rajp - Thanks for having us. So in terms of our organizational structure, we'll start with Los Angeles Cricket first.
Los Angeles Cricket is a nonprofit founded not too long ago in the wake of the Olympics and all the efforts around taking cricket into mainstream sporting events here in the United States and Los Angeles. Lashings is a minor league team that currently competes in the Minor League Cricket Tournament USA, that happens every year along with the major league cricket season.
Chris - So for those unfamiliar with the cricket scene, who is cricket popular with in LA and where is it played?
Abhi - Multiple places.
So, two pronged questions. I'll start with the first one, in terms of who plays it.
Currently, the sport is played in the Commonwealth Nations, or the expats from the Commonwealth Nations: Australia, English, India, Pakistan…any Commonwealth Nation that you can see.
We have expats from the United States, either they, or their offsprings, or their families. They enjoy the game all over the Southland. When we're talking about LA, most of the activity revolves around Sepulveda Basin in Van Nuys in terms of recreational cricket, as well as in East whale as well as in San Diego, and a few other major hot spots.
Chris - Okay, so very generally speaking, and I mean this very generally, cricket, for those only familiar with baseball, has more scoring, longer games, different rules for a batter being “outed” and a differently shaped field of play among a gigantic amount of other finer differences. What is it about the sport that you think will excite newcomers watching the Olympics?
Abhi - Well, I think cricket has changed a lot. It's not a sport that is longer than, for lack of any other comparison, baseball. A cricket game, especially the one that we are getting on with the Olympics, is a T-20 format, and we'll probably go into the explanations of that later on,. Essentially it's a three hour game. So, that's as much, almost as much as a baseball game.
The amount of time that one spends in the sport of cricket has came down a lot from the five days of a format called “test cricket,” to the one day format that it has called “one day cricket.”
The format that is in the Olympics and widely played and enjoyed is called the T-20 format.
Now, why is it making all this noise? Like you said, it's got a lot of run scoring, which means lots of fly balls, lots of homers. In cricket, we call them sixes. So home runs in cricket are sixes and lots of action that happened on every single pitch.
I was just in MLC watching the game with the folks at Fairplex out in Pomona, and they couldn't believe the amount of action that happens at every single pitch in a cricket game. So, there's much to learn and love about the sport. You could only truly understand it if you go out to a cricket game, watch it, and talk to people, to understand what's going on. And it's not a hard sport to pick up, but there are definitely lots of differences between it and baseball
Chris - Overall, like the field of play in the directions you're allowed to go in, it's generally more freewheeling, less tightly constricted around having to do things in a specific directional way, and that's what looks really fun to me. And it also looks like just a fun time to watch, even when people start racking up. You're gonna have to correct me here, because I don't remember this from my pregame research, but when the two batters start switching and running off back and forth, racking up points, it looks like it makes people smile, depending on which team they're on.
Abhi - Well, think about it this way. You're running to a base, right? You're running to a base, but you get to hit the ball again if you get back to home base. So what's wrong with that?
Chris - In the Olympics, is there anyone you're aware of who we should watch for, who you're expecting to be on the US team or on any other national teams?
Abhi - Well, I think it's going to be a very fresh and young squad from every nation that gets to compete in the Olympics, but a few of the elites and the knowns and the legends of the game are still playing.
We are still about two and a half years away from there, so I don't know which ones are currently confirmed as we approach the games, but a few of the bigger names that come from the likes of Australia or England, which will probably be a conglomeration of the Great Britain team. There's still talks about that.
India that will compete, and they have legends of the game themselves. So there's still much deliberation in terms of the composition of the teams.
For example, in the word cricket “England” plays, but the Olympics team “Great Britain” plays, which is, I believe, Scotland, England and Wales. So that changes the spectrum of what an England cricket team would look like to what a Great Britain cricket team would look like. Similar things happen in the West Indies, where Jamaica, Trinidad and another small nation come together when we talk about cricket.
So yes, a lot of talent will hone in in Los Angeles in 2028 and we can't wait to be more excited in turning up which legends will still be there, and which other new, fresh talent will be coming in to just light up the skies here.
Chris - How did cricket actually make it into the official Olympic slate for 2028
Abhi - We sit with some decision makers, so we get to understand a little bit in the process, a very small aspect of it.
Every Olympics, they are asked for new sports to be added on to the Olympics and cricket has been on that list, trying to get added on to the Olympics for quite a while and it hasn't happened.
But the resurgence of cricket has happened under the newest format, T 20, over the last 15 years. This format started in 2007 in an official capacity by the International Cricket Council.
Now this is 2028 that we're talking about. So within 19 years of the format starting the sport will actually make it to the Olympics. I think that's the biggest change after this format came along, where not only the volume of participants across the already playing nations has increased ginormously, but also the volume of the associate and the not so known nations that were just emerging in the cricketing world had also skyrocketed quite a lot. Because of the duration of the game, the smaller impact in terms of time taken away, etc, as well as the benefits of getting the community together towards a cricket game that everyone can enjoy.
Now, when the Olympics set up a committee, we have a few individuals that are from Los Angeles that went to basically bat for the sport for a long period. Only in October of 2023 is when we got the final confirmation that the sport will be included.
You've got to understand that this is a crazy and almost insane idea, that the Olympics said yes to cricket in 2028 in Los Angeles, with zero infrastructure that is required to set up an Olympic event. That was the biggest challenge and hurdle that the Olympic Committee, the forward committee trying to Present cricket, has had over the last 15 years. Over the last six, seven years they've been trying to court the IOC to get cricket into LA 2028 and that's been the biggest hurdle that has been addressed with the Fairplex. But even so, you've got to think that there must have been a lot of trust and faith in all these individuals to be able to get cricket here.
We're still talking about what, two and a half years away, and their stadium still has to be built.
Chris - So what was your organization's reaction when Cricket was officially included?
Abhi - Not just our organization's reaction, but the cricketing world's reaction, all over, has been one of just gratitude that we are going to be seeing this…the sport that is played at such a large volume. It’s the number two sport in the world, back in the Olympics. Yeah, you could say it was played in the 1900s but we're not going to go back all the way over there. We're going to treat this as a T 20 format of cricket that's coming in, a fresh game. And everyone's excited about it, especially the kids who have started taking up the game. Looking at their legends of the new era with this new format that have just taken over the skies for the sport.
Chris - Are you guys in communication with Pomona on the Fairplex about getting cricket programming off the ground? In the meantime, I know you said there's no stadium yet, but getting towards that, and getting towards exhibitions and other programs that get people and their kids out and interested.
Abhi - We were just talking to them about all of this not too long ago this weekend at the MLC games in Oakland. But yeah, there are a lot of plans. I'm not quite at liberty to discuss too much about this, but there's definitely a roadmap that includes not only the Fairplex, but the Olympics, the ICC USA cricket, as well as MLC. These are all entities that are involved one way or another, to the utilization of this venue, as well as the opportunity to grow the game with the help of this event not just locally in Los Angeles, but all over the US.
Chris - Abhi, thanks so much for joining us on SGVConnect.
Abhi - Thank you so much for having us, Chris. And if your readers want to know a little bit more about cricket, let them join us at http://LosAngelescricket.org or on our social handles.