Let's play, y'all

The All-Stars series scheduled in New York, Houston and Los Angeles next month is cricket's latest attempt to endear itself to Americans. It's unlikely that the matches, featuring Sachin Tendulkar, Shane Warne, Brian Lara, Jacques Kallis, Muttiah Muralitharan and others, will prompt American sports fans to drop their baseball bats, footballs, basketballs, ice hockey sticks and pick up our beautiful willows, but that doesn't mean cricket doesn't have a presence in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Above, in a photograph from 1861, cricket and baseball share space in a field at Princeton University. Cricket's possibly the one on the left, given the sightscreen-like structure there. The earliest college cricket club in the United States is said to have been formed at Haverford College in 1834. In 1881, the Universities of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Columbia and Princeton joined with Haverford to form the Intercollegiate Cricket Association, which survived till 1924.

Shaq Fu may not have been a hit, but Shaq-krit? Shaq bowling Garner-esque yorkers and hitting balls out of the MCG? Imagine what he'd do in New Zealand's grounds. In this photo, taken in 2013, Shaq takes part in a cricket promotion in Sacramento.

Teams from Trinidad and St Lucia play a match in New York's Van Cortlandt Park in 1948. In 2013, the park underwent a $13 million renovation, after which ten new cricket fields were added. Officials claim that it is now the largest site for cricket in the USA.

In 2011, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, in partnership with the MCC, hosted an exhibition that explored the connections between cricket and its American cousin. Here, senior curator Tom Shieber poses with the oldest-known cricket uniform, dating from circa 1820. Arjuna Ranatunga and Merv Hughes would probably pop a few of the buttons on it in the post-lunch session, but how stylish would some of the more svelte players look in this - Viv and Imran, for instance? And it's definitely a step up from some of the ghastly T20 franchise jerseys we see today.

British tourists play an exhibition match in St Louis, Missouri in 1965. The spectators standing on the kerb (or "curb" as the Americans spell it) don't look terribly engaged, do they? More like they are waiting to cross the road once these slow-moving creatures stop blocking it. Hopefully the All-Stars will get a better reception.