Major League Cricket to launch in 2023


Cricket is a sport that is popular in many Asian and European countries but not widely known in the United States but Major League Cricket (MLC) hopes to change that when it launches with six teams in July.

The league will have teams representing Dallas (TX), San Francisco (CA), Los Angeles (CA), Washington (DC), Seattle (WA) and New York (NY) in its first season.  Team names will be announced soon.

The league’s historic opening match will take place on July 13, 2023, at the newly constructed Major League Cricket venue, Grand Prairie Stadium, in Grand Prairie, TX. The 2023 season will feature 19 matches to be played over 18 days, building up to the first-ever MLC championship final to take place on July 30, 2023.

In November 2022, it was announced the first season of MLC will be staged from July 13–30 at Grand Prairie Stadium in Dallas, Texas. The tournament will be played in a single round-robin format with 15 league matches played among six franchises before a four-match play-off phase. MLC also hopes to play matches in a to be constructed stadium in Los Angeles, and Church Street Park, North Carolina.

The MLC will implement the Twenty20 format which is a shortened game format of cricket. At the professional level, it was introduced by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) in 2003 for the inter-county competition. In a Twenty20 game, the two teams have a single innings each, which is restricted to a maximum of 20 overs. Together with first-class and List A cricket, Twenty20 is one of the three current forms of cricket recognized by the International Cricket Council (ICC) as being at the highest international or domestic level.

A typical Twenty20 game is completed in about two and a half hours, with each innings lasting around 70 minutes and an official 10-minute break between the innings. This is much shorter than previous forms of the game and is closer to the timespan of other popular team sports. It was introduced to create a fast-paced game that would be attractive to spectators at the ground and viewers on television. 

The player draft will be held in February or March.  There is currently a cricket minor league in the United States called Minor League Cricket with 26 teams.  

Go to https://www.majorleaguecricket.com/


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