Bold bid to stage T20 World Cup in New York City's Central Park

Cricket imagined for New York’s Central Park.

Bold bid to stage T20 World Cup in New York City's Central Park

Ben Horne, The Daily Telegraph

CRICKET is determined to take a chunk out of the Big Apple, and James Sutherland reckons they should be going straight for the core.

With Yankee Stadium the wrong shape and the international cricket ground in Florida too irrelevant, the Cricket Australia chief executive is asking why the iconic New York landmark, Central Park, smack bang in the middle of Manhattan, can’t host Australia v India in a World Twenty20 showpiece for the ages.

The world’s most iconic park visited by 25 million people every year has packed in hundreds of thousands of fans for superstar concerts like Bon Jovi, Mariah Carey and Paul Simon, and now Virat Kohli and David Warner are being imagined as the next headline acts to grace the open green pastures of cricket’s first-ever pop-up stadium.

Adam Zampa, Usman Khawaja and Steve Smith in Times Square, New York.

The ICC board led by Cricket Australia are pushing for a World Cup to be played in the United States in the next eight-year international cycle, between 2023-2031, which they believe with the right planning and investment can emulate FIFA’s hugely successful American World Cup back in 1994.

However, unlike soccer which simply used big time rectangular NFL stadiums located in every city, finding appropriate cricket venues remains an enormous obstacle for administrators to overcome.

When Shane Warne took his band of All-Star globetrotters to America a couple of years ago, the crowds in New York, Houston and Los Angeles were stunning, but the legitimacy of cricket played on elongated baseball diamonds was ridiculous.