American league doomed to fail

Michael Atherton isn't expecting the American Premier League, a six-team Twenty20 tournament likely to be held in New York in October, to be much of a success. He points to the failure of the American Professional Cricket four years ago, which folded within a season of its inception, and the Stanford fiasco to prove America will prove hard to crack. More in the Times.

Cricket's lack of popularity in America has little to do with the length or complexity of the game - and there is always a faint whiff of anti-Americanism about the sneers that it is just too complex for them to understand - and more to do with the origins of baseball's remarkable story ... The ultimate victory of baseball over cricket was part of the unstoppable tide of patriotism: a new game - democratic and classless - for a new nation. Cricket was damned by association and retreated to the margins, kept going, as it has been since, by Anglophiles and, more recently, those of Caribbean and Indian extraction.