John Norton, a retired police officer from Long Island, sat in a folding chair and watched his grandson’s Little League game in East Meadow on Wednesday. The quiet spot is less than a mile from where one of the biggest sporting events in the world would take place in a few days, but Mr. Norton, like many people in the area, was only vaguely aware of the details.
“I saw the stadium from the street,” Mr. Norton said. “I don’t know the first thing about cricket, but I guess it’s going to be pretty crazy over there.”
The stadium he saw — the Nassau County International Cricket Stadium — seemed to have popped up almost overnight. Now it sits on one edge of the 930-acre Eisenhower Park, a massive — if temporary — cricket stadium that was built in sections, like a giant erector set, over the last 100 days. It will host eight matches of the Men’s T20 World Cup, an international cricket tournament expected to draw the attention of hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide, even if most people in New York seem barely aware of its existence.
Matches will also be held in six Caribbean nations along with Dallas and Lauderhill, Fla. The event officially opens on Saturday in Dallas, where the United States plays Canada. The stadium in East Meadow, which can hold 34,000 spectators, will be inaugurated with an exhibition match on Saturday between India and Bangladesh.
So why go to all the effort to host the event in a quiet park in suburban Long Island? The aim is to make new fans out of people like Mr. Norton or, ideally, his grandson. The International Cricket Council, which runs the event, estimates there are already 200,000 cricket players in the United States (up from 30,000 players 20 years ago). Geoff Allardice, a former professional cricket player from Australia and the chief executive of the I.C.C., said that even with more than a billion fans, cricket can become more popular globally.
“One of the things we are trying to do is take the game to new markets,” he said. “New York is a big step for our sport.”
The most anticipated match in the group stage is the showdown between India and Pakistan on June 9 at East Meadow. That rivalry, between two of the world’s best cricketing nations, has a bitter history on and off the pitch — like the Red Sox against the Yankees on a much larger scale and fraught with decades of geopolitical tensions. The last time the countries played against each other, at a different World Cup event last year, 323 million viewers watched in India alone, more than twice the audience of the last Super Bowl.
“The Indian cricket team would have to be the most popular international sporting team in the world, in terms of the number of followers,” Mr. Allardice said. “It’s not only the No. 1 sport, but it drives passion like nothing else.”
Besides the new stadium, fans in New York can also watch matches live on a video screen at the Oculus near the World Trade Center. Citi Field, home of the New York Mets, will host a viewing party for the India-Pakistan match on June 9.
The I.C.C. is hoping that this event will do for cricket what the 1994 World Cup did for soccer in the United States: crash the dominance that baseball, basketball, football and hockey once held.
A traditional cricket match is a notoriously long affair, so much so that there are tea breaks. Games can last most of the day, and then there are five-day internationals. But about 20 years ago, a new format was invented, called Twenty20, or T20 for short, that limited play to about around three hours, and its popularity soared globally.
There have been many leagues and clubs in the United States over the decades; last year saw the inception of Major League Cricket, a professional league. New York’s team won the championship, but it plays its games in Texas for now, while hoping to build a permanent stadium in the New York area.
For the World Cup, the I.C.C. initially proposed installing a venue in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, a center for New York area cricket. But local opposition, including from cricketers who did not want to lose their playing fields during construction and play, forced the I.C.C. to look elsewhere. It settled on Eisenhower Park in November, and when word reached media outlets in India, some toured the site and discovered a small, scraggly pitch.
“They were appalled,” said Don Lockerbie, the venue development director, who grew up in nearby Stony Brook on Long Island. “They didn’t know what we were going to build here.”
The playing field, with the rectangular pitch in the middle, was fashioned from special grass grown in Florida. The grandstands are borrowed materials most recently used at Las Vegas’s Formula 1 race and professional golf events. After the last match is held at East Meadow on June 12, the stadium will be dismantled, the parts shipped back to Las Vegas and another golf event, and Eisenhower Park will return to normal, but with a world-class cricket pitch left behind.
Mr. Norton wished the cricket teams good luck in the tournament as he watched his grandson play baseball, but said he had no plans to attend.
“I barely get to any Yankee games,” he said.
Victor Mather contributed reporting.
