Ricky Ponting: US Cricket Is a Slow Burn, and the Bottleneck Sits in Primary Schools

On the outskirts of New York, an indoor cricket training facility has just opened. Every net is fitted with performance-tracking technology that records ball speed, bat swing angle and the trajectory of each shot. The man behind the investment is Ricky Ponting, former Australia captain, two-time World Cup winner, and now head coach of Washington Freedom in Major League Cricket, the United States' flagship professional T20 competition.

What made me stop at this detail was not the equipment inside. It was that one man is simultaneously running a team at the top tier of American cricket and pouring money into the bottom tier, where a ten-year-old picks up a bat for the first time and cannot name a single national team. Ponting holds both ends of a value chain. And in a Reuters report, he is the one saying what few in the industry want to hear: cricket in America is growing, but it is growing slowly.

I read that passage several times. It is not shocking, but it runs directly against the tone of most coverage about a sport expanding into the world's largest market. For someone used to standing on the sideline and recording what actually happens rather than what is advertised, that tonal reversal is a signal worth following.

In a sports market where everyone wants to tell a boom story, the insider chooses to tell a patience story.

Context: A young league in a market that was never cricket country

To understand why Ponting's words carry weight, the map matters.

Major League Cricket launched as a professional T20 league on American soil, operating on a franchise model similar to North American sports leagues. Its structure rests on a familiar global cricket formula: import international stars to create immediate pull, while trying to build a domestic player pool. Ponting sits in the head coach's chair at Washington Freedom, one of the league's best-resourced franchises.

The ground beneath MLC is the more telling part. America has never been cricket country in the mass-market sense. This is a place where baseball has owned the bat-and-ball category for more than a century. A child growing up in Texas or Ohio learns to throw a baseball before knowing cricket exists. Any comparison between US cricket and cricket in India, England or Pakistan is skewed from the starting line.

Against that map, two events serve as time markers. First, the US men's national team has competed closely with established Test nations at the last two T20 World Cups, and produced a historic win over Pakistan, a former world champion, on home soil. Second, cricket has been included in the programme for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games.

Those two markers create a clear frame: American cricket has a fixed global-visibility deadline, and until that deadline arrives, every investment, every development programme and every broadcast deal will be measured against one question. Will the United States have enough players to field a team of its own when the Olympic lights come on?

As an observer by trade, I always re-check the context before trusting commentary. Some stories look perfectly reasonable until you place them beside the baseline data. Here, the baseline shows US cricket in an emerging phase, not a boom phase. An emerging sports market has an awkward property: it is easily misread in both directions. Optimists read it as linear growth. Pessimists read it as a gamble with no foundation. Both readings miss the hardest part, which is the conversion of fan enthusiasm into actual players.

And this is the point I want to hold through the rest of this piece: American cricket is missing something money cannot buy within a single season. It is missing a generation of players raised on its own streets.

The real numbers: A stable club and an over-performing national team

I need to be explicit about how I read results, because this is where sideline observers most often go wrong.

Washington Freedom under Ponting won the MLC title in 2026, his first season in charge. In the two following seasons they reached the final and lost. Read simply, that is a team in decline. Read the way someone who has stood long enough on the touchline would read it, that is three consecutive seasons inside the last two of the competition, a level of consistency most young franchises do not achieve. In a young league where rosters turn over every season and the schedule is compressed, reaching back-to-back finals says more about operating structure than a single championship does.

But this is where I have to apply my own three-source rule. Three seasons is too small a sample. I have no batting data, no situational win rates, no measure of squad quality relative to the rest of the league. Without those, I cannot separate genuine coaching ability from recruitment quality or knockout luck. One title and two runner-up finishes establish that Ponting's floor sits at the top of the league, but the ceiling remains unmeasured.

On the national team side, the picture has firmer facts. The USA beat Pakistan at a home T20 World Cup. That is one of those upsets that belongs in the record books, and the way I always read upsets, it did not come from a miracle. It came from an underdog pressing hard while a favourite rotated its squad and underestimated the opponent. In cricket, that shows up as bowling to the right field, hitting into the right zones, and a lower order that does not lose control in the decisive overs. It is a pattern I have seen repeated across sports: the weaker side does not need to play better across the whole match. It needs to play right at the right moment.

Together, two American cricket teams at two different levels show progress. But they show a fragile kind of progress. The national team's progress rests on a handful of big matches. The club's progress rests on one world-class coach. Both can stop if the underlying conditions do not change.

I remember something I once wrote after watching a three-hour training session purely to count the foot rhythm of a midfielder in change-of-direction drills. Foot rhythm on the pitch does not lie, if you stand on the touchline long enough. For US cricket, the foot rhythm sits somewhere else: not in the big matches, but in the number of children doing the basic movements correctly every week. That is a metric no news bulletin reports.

The real bottleneck: The fight with baseball starts in schoolyards

This is the most important thing Ponting said, and the most frequently skipped when outlets quote only the phrase about slow growth.

He made two points. One, cricket needs to take root in primary schools. Two, cricket's direct competitor in America is baseball, because both compete for the same children with the same foundational skill set: throwing, catching, hitting, running between markers.

On the surface, this is advice anyone could give. Look closer and it is a significant correction to how people usually imagine a sport's development.

The popular sequence runs like this: you get stars, then a league, then television, then viewers, then children who want to play. Ponting partly reverses that order when he says a successful national team is what starts growth at every level. Yet he also says that without children in schoolyards, the national team will have nobody to select. Side by side, those statements form a loop: no strong national team means no grassroots movement, and no grassroots movement means no strong national team.

That loop is not a logical error. It is an accurate description of a market in a cold-start phase, where both ends need to be lit at once. It also exposes the strategic weakness of US cricket: the two ends are being lit by very different resources. The national-team end is lit by a few big wins and media attention. The grassroots end is lit by private investment, including Ponting's own money.

And here is the core problem. If the resources for the foundation depend on the goodwill of a few wealthy individuals, that growth can stop the moment those individuals change their minds.

One more point gets little airtime: the contest with baseball is not a fair fight. Baseball in America has a school system, college scholarships, a professional league and a clear career path from age ten to age thirty. US cricket has a young league, a handful of training facilities and an unproven Olympic ticket. A parent with an athletic ten-year-old son will pick which path? The answer is nearly pre-written.

That is why I believe the most important US cricket metric over the next three years is not broadcast revenue, not stadium attendance, but the number of primary schools holding one cricket session a week. An unglamorous number that never makes the front page and almost nobody tracks.

I once witnessed empty stands during a suspended season. Empty ground, full hearts, and that year I understood why I sit where I sit. When the terraces go quiet, you realise what keeps a sport alive is not the big matches, but the people who still show up when there is nothing to watch. US cricket is in exactly that phase: it needs people who turn up before there is any glory to wait for.

One man's value chain: Coaching the team while funding the root

There is a detail in the report I think will be referenced far more in the coming years: Ponting is an investor in Century Cricket Centres, which has just opened its first indoor cricket training facility in New York, equipped with performance-tracking technology.

Place those two roles side by side and a notable structure appears. He coaches at the premium end of the product, where the league sells tickets, rights and star imagery. And he owns part of the infrastructure at the very bottom, where a child is trained into a player and where, in theory, the raw material for the league he works in will come from.

As business logic, this is a vertical bet. It only makes sense if US cricket genuinely grows over the next ten to fifteen years. If the market does not grow, both ends lose value at the same time.

Here I have to say something the report does not. A former world-class player putting money into an emerging market performs a dual function. The first is commerce. The second is credibility transfer. When someone like Ponting invests in US cricket, other investors and sponsors read it as a signal that the market is trustworthy. This mechanism has repeated itself across emerging sports: the credibility of the early mover is converted into capital for the later ones.

But that mechanism has a downside. It turns one individual into the pivot for the entire story. If Ponting says US cricket is growing slowly, that is no longer a coach's opinion. It is a signal from someone with a competitive stake, an investment stake, and an unofficial spokesperson role for the whole market.

One more thing about infrastructure. An indoor facility in New York addresses a very specific constraint of cricket at this latitude: winter. You cannot train outdoors when snow covers the ground. Without indoor space, US cricket loses four months of youth development every year. Capital flowing into exactly that gap suggests at least someone is thinking long term, not just counting a season's ticket sales.

Still, I have to return to the first question. How many facilities like that are enough for a country of more than three hundred million people? One facility in New York is a start, but it does not answer the question of scale. And in sport, the distance between a pilot project and a national system is often the distance between two decades.

The contrarian angle: Caution can be a communications strategy

At this point I want to turn against the rest of this piece, because that is how I check myself whenever a story becomes too easy to believe.

The most common reading of Ponting's remarks will be this: an insider bravely telling the truth, willing to admit US cricket has not exploded as expected. A neat, tidy, highly shareable reading.

Now try the other direction. What happens to a man who is simultaneously a coach and an investor when he publicly lowers expectations about the growth pace of the market he is backing?

If growth stays slow, he warned first. If growth suddenly accelerates, he was patiently right. In both scenarios, the person who voiced caution holds the advantage in the discourse. This is a form of expectation management anyone who has worked in media recognises: when you set the bar low, every subsequent positive outcome becomes your achievement.

I am not saying Ponting is calculating this way. I am saying we cannot rule it out, and a careful reader has to hold both possibilities at once.

Another detail reinforces this reading. A major wire service published a deflationary view from a world-class figure in a prominent slot. Editors weighed it and chose that angle over a growth celebration. In newsrooms, that choice says something about the current state of the market: sobriety is outselling enthusiasm.

And there is a paradox sitting inside Ponting's own argument. He says development must start at the root, in primary schools. He also says a successful national team is what kick-starts growth. Those two propositions cannot both be true in a linear causal sense. One must be the driver and the other the consequence. That an experienced coach does not decisively choose between them suggests that even insiders have not pinned down the real lever in this market.

When even insiders cannot agree on what is cause and what is effect, the market is in an experimental phase, not an expansion phase.

This brings back three times I mispronounced Xhaka's name during a match in Kaliningrad. Three mispronunciations taught me to read people before writing about them. I had to sit down for a month, note the correct pronunciation of every player, and build my own database. The lesson was not that I erred. The lesson was that I trusted my memory instead of verifying. With US cricket, there is an easy belief to fall into: that a big market automatically produces a big sport. Sports history is full of big markets that swallowed small sports whole.

The 2028 deadline: Biggest opportunity and biggest risk

If I had to name a single variable that could change the whole US cricket story, I would point to the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics.

This is a fixed, non-negotiable deadline with global visibility. In sports economics, such deadlines have a powerful effect: they pull capital and talent toward short-horizon growth stories. Sponsors want to be present before the lights come on. Broadcasters want content before audiences care. Federations want selection pathways before they must publish squads. All that pressure converges on one date.

But this is also the easiest place to get it wrong.

An Olympic Games can generate a spotlight, but a spotlight does not generate players. If by 2028 the United States still lacks a generation of properly trained young cricketers, that spotlight will expose the very gap it was meant to cover. In that case, the Olympics will not accelerate the slow-growth story. It will confirm it, in front of the world.

I have seen this model in other sports. A major event arriving when the foundation is ready produces a leap. A major event arriving before the foundation is ready produces a gap in collective memory: audiences watch, find the sport underwhelming, and do not come back.

For US cricket, both scenarios remain open. And what decides between them does not sit with Washington Freedom or any MLC franchise. It sits in the number of school grounds holding one cricket session a week, the number of trained coaches, and the number of parents choosing cricket over baseball for their children.

In other words, the 2028 deadline will not be decided in Los Angeles. It will be decided in cities nobody films.

Risks and signals to track

Taken together, US cricket faces a fairly ordered set of risks.

The biggest is a thin player pipeline. This is a medium-probability, high-impact risk, because it directly affects whether the national team's progress can be sustained. Without the next cohort, current results will be a phase in memory rather than a foundation.

The second is dependence on a single individual. Ponting currently holds three roles at once: coach, investor and unofficial spokesperson. That structure works in a start-up phase and becomes fragile in an expansion phase. A mature market needs several pillars, not one.

The third is reliance on investment flows rather than durable revenue. When a sport grows on the money of a few wealthy backers and on an approaching event, it does not yet have its own financial base. I cannot assess this further, because the report discloses no revenue, cost or valuation figures.

The fourth, and possibly the most underrated, is communications. A cautious message repeated often enough can slow the very capital it is trying to attract. People invest in growth stories, not patience stories. This is a paradox anyone in sports media has touched: telling the truth too early can damage the thing you are trying to protect.

So what should be tracked?

First, youth participation figures and school cricket programmes. This is the only indicator that can confirm or refute the entire slow-growth thesis. If participation rises year on year, the story turns. If it stalls, the bottleneck remains.

Second, Washington Freedom's competitive trajectory. Another title would reinforce Ponting's coaching value. Continued runner-up finishes would tell the story of a strong team that has not crossed the final threshold.

Third, national team results against established opponents. One big win is an upset. Three competitive matches in a row is a platform. The two are entirely different in meaning.

Fourth, commercial announcements around the 2028 Olympics: sponsorship, rights, infrastructure. This is the indicator of how much the market genuinely believes, rather than how excited it feels.

And fifth, a small but notable detail. The report's timeline needs verification. The information that Washington Freedom won in 2026 and lost finals in the two subsequent editions raises a question about when the article was published. This is the kind of detail anyone practising root-level verification must note, because a single wrong date can skew the entire reading of growth pace.

What is worth keeping

If I had to extract one thing from this story for observers, it would be this.

In sport, growth is not measured by what happens on the big stage. It is measured by what happens where there is no audience: school grounds, training rooms, late afternoons when a child repeats a throwing motion for the thirtieth time. US cricket has a stage. It has a global deadline. It even has a few people willing to fund the root.

What it does not have is time. And time is the only thing money cannot buy in sport.

I will keep following this story the way I follow every story: not by watching the flashbulbs, but by watching the foot rhythm of the people training. Because foot rhythm on the pitch does not lie, if you stand on the touchline long enough. And for US cricket, the real question is not whether it will boom in 2028. The question is whether anyone is counting the children playing cricket each week, so that by then we know how far we have actually come.