The Insider- Cricket goes to Hollywood

By Paul Ford - Republished from Outright 59 (winter 2025)

In recent dispatches around the appointment of the new Black Caps coach the enticing proposition of attending the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics was included in the coach’s ‘demanding’ upcoming schedule.

It piqued my interest: I’d clean forgotten this was on the cards, and had no idea how our cricket teams were going to make it to the City of Angels in three years. Having now looked into it, I can confirm the cricket is definitely happening, but the qualification process remains the scheduling equivalent of a Sri Lankan spinner’s mystery ball. 

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In 2028, cricket will be played at the Olympics for the first time since 1900 - men and women are set to play six-team contests in the wham bam thank you ma’am 20-over format. It will be competing for coolness with the other ‘new’ Olympic sports: baseball/softball, flag football, lacrosse and squash.

The cricket matches will be played at a temporary stadium in Pomona, 50km east of Los Angeles and best-known for hosting the LA County Fair, art deco architecture and the American Museum of Ceramic Art. Cricket will be a bull in the Pomona china shop.

There is much speculation about how the 12 teams will be chosen, and specifically around whether the home team should have a spot reserved - a problematic demand  given the occasional giant killing USA men’s team is #17 and their women’s team is #24 in the ICC rankings. 

The simplest approach would appear to be just pick a cut-off date and have the top six teams pack their bags for the Games. Coincidentally if that date was today it’d be India, Australia, England, New Zealand, West Indies and South Africa who would be there for both the men’s and the women’s competitions.

The ICC’s associate member delegate from Botswana (T20 ranking: circa #50) is on the record as saying it’d be unrealistic to have a minnow in the mix. “Cricket is coming back into the Olympics after 128 years. We need to make a strong impression so that people will say: OK, we don't want them to go back and beg before every Olympics.”

Sanjay Govil, the Canadian-born, Indian-American businessman who owns the Washington Freedom Major League Cricket team also supports a best of the best process. “It should be based on merit, because we also want to make sure that it's competitive, right? I think we should have the six best because otherwise it would be unfair to leave out a team to accommodate the USA as host.”

So it all sounds easy, but there are wrinkles in need of an iron for this plan too: for example England (and Wales) is not a team at the Olympics as it competes as part of Great Britain. So recently the England and Wales Cricket Board and Cricket Scotland announced they will join forces for the sport’s long-awaited return, and a tripartite hook-up with Cricket Ireland is in train.

And what of the West Indies as a cricket-specific artifice? The Olympics doesn’t factor in a composite team of players from a mosaic of 15 countries that attend as individual nations which do not have country-specific ICC rankings. Perhaps there will be a pan-Caribbean qualifying tournament for the right to represent the ‘West Indies’ at the Games? 

The lobbying for a fair and transparent pathway is under way from the West Indies Cricket Board: “We must ensure that our cricketers are not shut out of history. We are ready to collaborate. We are ready to compete. But above all, we are asking for fairness.”

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The qualification route is one thing to navigate: the commerciality of the Olympic Games movement is another. 

As NZCPA boss Heath Mills wrote in The Bounce Substack newsletter last year. “As it’s climbed to the multibillion-dollar event we see today, many people have made a lot of money including broadcasters, commercial sponsors, event service providers, property developers, construction firms, catering companies and betting agencies, but not the athletes. 

“Cricket’s inclusion will generate hundreds of millions of dollars in additional broadcast and commercial revenue for the IOC, largely due to India…We know that the IOC will keep all this extra revenue for themselves and not a cent will go to cricket’s national bodies or players."

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But what of this 128-year hiatus: why was cricket in the Olympics in 1900, and why was this a solitary appearance? 

It was in Paris and there were just two miserable teams representing ‘Great Britain’ and ‘France’ after Belgium and the Netherlands were late withdrawals. Weirdly the British team was comprised of players from the Devon and Somerset Wanderers, a touring side from Castle Cary Cricket Club and pupils from Blundell School.

The Wanderers were already heading to Paris for a three-match tour and accidentally wandered into a 12-a-side fixture against the hosts who were almost all British blokes working at the British Embassy in Paris. “It was effectively a team of English expats against a team of Devonians and men from Somerset,” Wisden reports. “To say they were playing for an Olympic gold medal was almost a misnomer: it was essentially an accidental match that became an Olympic play-off." Ridiculousness!

Great Britain scored 117, then bowled the French Embassy out for 78. In their second innings GBR declared at 145/5, bowling the French out for 26 to win the match by 158 runs. Brilliantly France had scored 10 runs for the loss of 11 wickets in the run chase and then ‘played for time’, only for their 11th and final wicket to succumb five minutes before stumps.

Hardly a great advertisement for the game - confirmed when cricket was invited to be in the 1904 Olympic Games in St Louis, Missouri, but not enough teams entered for it to go ahead. And so it has been for over a century.

Whatever the qualification process and however the dollars are distributed in 2028, it has got to be better than the aftermath of 1900, and then we can all hop, skip and jump over the Tasman for the 2032 edition at The Gabba in Brisbane.

Paul Ford is the co-founder of the Beige Brigade and part of The Alternative Commentary Collective. He is not very good at baseball, softball, flag football, lacrosse, squash, or cricket.