Liam Plunkett: The England World Cup winner taking cricket to the U.S.

New York Times

4 days ago

A casual cricket observer's last memory of Liam Plunkett might have been from the 2019 World Cup.
Plunkett was the unsung hero of that England team, the man who bowled the unsexy middle overs and invariably picked up crucial wickets: three of which came in the final, during that extraordinary win over New Zealand.
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Despite his contributions, the final was his last appearance of 124 across all formats for England, and when a player disappears from the international game it is easy for them to also disappear from the collective consciousness.
But Plunkett, 40, has been busy. Busy, for the last few years, trying to embed cricket into the sporting landscape of America.
Plunkett spent plenty of time in the U.S. — his wife, Emeleah, is from Pennsylvania — but after a couple of post-World Cup years playing in England and the Bangladesh Premier League, he moved there permanently at the end of 2021.
The initial basic idea was that he would play in the newly launched Major League Cricket, and do some coaching, but once he arrived he was straight in at the grass roots level.
'Two weeks in, I'm on my hands and knees throwing to five-year-olds,' Plunkett tells The Athletic, over the phone from California, where he was preparing for a game for his MLC side, San Francisco Unicorns.
Plunkett strikes again! 👏
Leg bail tumbles as Nicholls drags Plunkett on!
Follow #WeAreEngland v #BackTheBlackCaps in the #CWC19 final live on Sky Sports Cricket here: https://t.co/EHa6oOnuqI #Believe pic.twitter.com/npZgPzBeY6
— Sky Sports (@SkySports) July 14, 2019
The idea of coaching youngsters soon evolved into coaching other coaches to coach the youngsters, on the basis that it would help spread the game at a participation level much quicker: applying the old maxim of 'if you teach a man to fish…' to cricket.
'I wanted to be fully involved. There are some good coaches here, but I thought as a whole it's kind of lacking structure. In England, or in Australia, there's probably 1,000 of me, whereas here there's one or two of us who can do this, so it makes sense to get fully involved and and try and grow it. And obviously for myself as well, it's created an opportunity to have a full-time role doing that.'
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Plunkett set up his own company — Liam Plunkett Cricket — primarily for just this, but last year also became involved in the Cricket Impact Group, the broad remit of which is to spread the cricketing gospel across America.
They have worked with baseball teams, put on beach cricket games, organised events with sponsors — essentially anything they can think of that will grow the game. Plunkett also talks about the opportunities on social media that other sports have taken advantage of, particularly citing how golf has been promoted on YouTube, TikTok and so forth.
It feels like he is a sort of unofficial ambassador for the game in America, spreading the word and trying to find the places it can establish roots. 'I thought there's a gap in the market, to build some sort of coaching structure here. We're building some really cool stuff because away from MLC for five weeks, what else is going on in cricket? How can we bring eyes to that cricket market in North America?
'It's about having the right strategy to say, 'We can put this into schools, it can be a six week course, one session per week for 30 minutes' — have fun, enjoy it, not very technical, just to give the kids an idea of what cricket is.'
All of that is effectively his day job, and actually playing cricket is now almost a sideline. But play he still does, for the Unicorns, coached by former Australia all-rounder Shane Watson, a team that also features internationals Jake Fraser-McGurk, Cooper Connolly, Haris Rauf and Finn Allen, the latter of whom scored an astonishing 51-ball 151 in the opening game of the tournament.
Finn Allen's out here breaking records 💯 He smashed the fastest century in MLC history for the @SFOUnicorns! 🔥 pic.twitter.com/SVyQ9n99Rf
— Cognizant Major League Cricket (@MLCricket) June 13, 2025
Pat Cummins would have played too, if the MLC season did not clash with the World Test Championship final and Australia's tour to the West Indies. Plunkett's Unicorns were knocked out in the play-offs by eventual winners MI New York.
If you were to remove the MLC branding and just looked at a list of this season's overseas players, it would not look much different to any other T20 league: Glenn Maxwell, Faf du Plessis, Quinton de Kock, Andre Russell, Alex Hales, David Warner, Lockie Ferguson, Jason Holder, Trent Boult, Marcus Stoinis. Some of those names basically come in the franchise league starter pack, but the point is that the standard of player in the MLC is higher than you might think.
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That will attract some attention, but it will not necessarily help embed cricket into a country that has plenty of sports competing for attention. Making it a popular participation sport however, could work: it's probably unhelpful to compare too much with football, but that's one of the reasons it established itself in America, by being a sport that youngsters play, which has translated into popularity as a spectator event. Much of Plunkett's work is geared towards that.
One of the problems that soccer had, in terms of 'breaking' America, stems from its superiority complex of it being the most popular sport in the world pretty much everywhere other than America. It was framed as a competition with NFL, baseball etc, almost like football was a colossal empire that was trying to conquer new lands. It feels like cricket is slightly more realistic, that it realises that it will not become equal to the established sports, but recognising that does not mean there is not a place for it.
From the other side of the world, it felt like interest in cricket spiked during the 2024 T20 World Cup, which was mainly hosted in the West Indies but also featured 16 games in Texas, Florida and New York. These included the USA's extraordinary super over win over Pakistan, and just for a moment it felt like the game was lodging in the collective sporting consciousness. If that was the case then Plunkett doesn't believe the legacy was lasting.
'I'm sure it had some sort of impact, but to be brutally honest — and people might not like me saying this — I feel like it was the World Cup was big in New York, and then it was like, 'OK, it's gone'.'
West Indies will begin their T20 series with three matches against Pakistan in Lauderhill, Florida, this week but the next big, international staging post will be the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, when cricket will be a full sport for the first time in 128 years.
'It'd be nice if a lot of people actually know what cricket is and get an appetite for it before the Olympics,' says Plunkett. 'But right now, the Olympics seem so far away. We've got so much to do. I feel like if we keep doing the things we're doing now, it's going to bring more attention and show the kind of pathway to the Olympics.'
On a personal level, Plunkett's playing career might not have long left, having turned 40 in April been a professional cricketer for 22 years. Plus, as we have established, he has plenty of other stuff going on.
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'I'll play if I feel like I can turn up and contribute and win a game,' he says. 'I guess in another six month's time, I'll see where my body's at and see what I feel. Can I turn up and see myself getting man of the match in one of these games and help win it? I still tick that box, I feel, so that's why I'm still playing. I don't want to be a person who's just dragging on and playing bits and pieces.'
But even if he stops playing, this World Cup winner's influence on cricket could only just be starting.
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