Ricky Ponting wants to drop the word ‘cricket’ to make the 'T20' sport popular in USA

Ricky Ponting wants to drop the word 'cricket' to make the 'T20' sport popular in USA originally appeared on Cricket News. Add Cricket News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

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Ricky Ponting says dropping the word "cricket" and rebranding as "T20" could help the sport break through in the United States of America (USA).

The Australian legend compares T20 to baseball to appeal to American audiences, highlighting the six-hitting frequency as a key selling point.

Cricket returns to the Olympics in 2028 in Los Angeles, backed by a new 10,000-seat dedicated stadium in California.

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'Leave the cricket thing aside': Ricky Ponting urges radical rebrand to pitch 'T20' sport to American fans

Ricky Ponting has a plan to crack America, and it starts with ditching the word "cricket" altogether.

The former Australia captain, now coaching in the United States' Major League Cricket setup, reckons the sport's name itself might be the single biggest barrier standing between T20 and mainstream American audiences.

Ponting has been coaching the Washington Freedom in Major League Cricket for two seasons now, giving him a closer look than most at the challenge of selling cricket to a country raised on baseball, basketball and American football. And he believes that the name of the sport carries too much baggage to gain popularity in the States.

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"If I were bringing it here wholly and solely to sell and promote the game, I wouldn't call it cricket," he told in an interview with The Athletic.

"It'd just be rebranded as T20 (Twenty20 cricket) only. Leave the cricket thing aside. As soon as young people hear cricket in parts of the world where they're not brought up on the game, they think about it being a long, drawn-out, five-day game, and it's not that."

It's a bold suggestion, as Ponting wants to strip away the association with Test cricket's five-day marathon, to package it as a two-hour entertainment product, which is exactly what the American sports market has historically rewarded.

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Ponting wants to sell T20 through the baseball comparison

Ponting's marketing pitch goes straight for what American sports fans actually understand. His comparison of choice is baseball, which is arguably the closest cultural equivalent to T20 in the US sporting landscape.

"I would compare it to baseball as much as I could and give kids that chance to understand you're hitting 15 sixes per game in a game of T20 cricket, but you are hitting less than one home run a game in the game of baseball," he said.

Americans love power hitting, and T20 delivers it in abundance. Hence, Ponting's framing makes that instantly identifiable for someone who's never been an avid follower of cricket.

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T20 cricket will feature at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, marking the sport's return to the Games after a 128-year gap. A 10,000-capacity cricket-specific stadium is being built in Pomona, California, which will double as the permanent home of MLC's LA Knight Riders. This gives the sport a home in the American sporting landscape for the first time.

MORE: Ricky Ponting claims Australia will look for a new No. 3 batter for South Africa Test series

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Ponting's branding idea is smarter than it sounds

At first glance, renaming cricket sounds a bit desperate, like a band changing its name to get a radio slot. But Ponting's point deserves to be taken seriously, because he's identifying a real problem.

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The word "cricket" means something very specific to most Americans, and none of it is flattering, as it conjures up images of white flannel, tea breaks and games that last longer than most television series. T20 is none of that, and the sport's global marketers have consistently failed to make that distinction clear enough.

MORE: Batters with most sixes in Test international cricket: Rishabh Pant overtakes Adam Gilchrist's 100 sixes tally

The baseball comparison is particularly relatable. Americans have a deep emotional connection with the idea of hitting a ball out of a stadium, and T20 essentially offers that at a rate no other bat-and-ball sport can match.

If someone walked into an American sports bar and pitched T20 as 'a game where someone hits fifteen home runs every two hours,' the reaction would almost certainly be more positive than 'watching a bit of cricket.' The 2028 Olympics adds urgency to getting this right, because the Los Angeles audience will define whether cricket builds American roots or remains a diaspora sport that briefly went viral during the T20 World Cup.

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