They helped Team USA, from a country where most people don’t even know how the game is played, beat a team of full-time, internationally renowned players.
The captain of the United States national cricket team, which defeated international powerhouse Pakistan on Thursday in the T20 World Cup, was running an Asian-food restaurant a few years ago.
Monank Patel, who led the U.S. batting attack with 50 runs scored against Pakistan, worked ten- to twelve-hour days running Teriyaki Madness, in South Carolina, from 2016 to 2018. He had moved to New Jersey in 2014 after failing to make the U19 Indian national cricket team. “Depleting monthly sales meant he had to double as a chef and as the manager to cut corners in a bid to stay afloat,” Cricbuzz reports.
He sold the business for a loss when his mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer and moved back to New Jersey to take care of her. He debuted for Team USA in September 2018. His mother got to see him score his first century, 100 runs, in a match against Uganda. She died a month later.
Patel says her last words to him were, “Keep playing and working very hard.” “I had a special bond with my mom,” Cricbuzz records Patel as saying. “She was my go-to person for all things life and cricket. She is the reason why I play cricket now.”
“Who would have imagined I’d be playing in a World Cup while I was tossing those woks all day in the middle of nowhere in South Carolina?” Patel told Cricbuzz.
Saurabh Netravalkar, the bowler who won the match for the U.S. in the final over, moved to the U.S. to get a master’s degree in computer engineering from Cornell in 2015. His full-time job is at Oracle in San Francisco. He is on leave until June 17 to play in the World Cup. If the U.S. advances beyond the group stage, he will have to request more time off.
Cornell was happy to have Netravalkar. “His strong academic credentials and keen interest in cricket, which helped him develop a player-analysis app CricDecode, had earned him a scholarship,” ESPNcricinfo reports.
He also had been in the Indian national cricket system when he was younger, playing in the U19 World Cup in 2010. India lost to Pakistan in that tournament. One member of the Pakistan U19 squad that year was Babar Azam — the captain of the Pakistan team Netravalkar and the U.S. defeated on Thursday.
Netravalkar played for the Washington Freedom in the inaugural season of Major League Cricket last year. He was the player of the match against the San Francisco Unicorns on July 22 when he took six wickets and conceded only nine runs.
“When you love something, it is never a job for you. So when I am out there on the field, I love bowling and trying to out-think a batter. When I am coding, I love doing that and hence it never feels like work,” Netravalkar told Indian news agency PTI after Thursday’s win against Pakistan.
Pakistan’s team is composed of full-time, internationally renowned players, such as wicket-keeper Mohammad Rizwan, the 2021 Men’s T20I Cricketer of the Year and only player to ever score 2,000 runs in T20 play in the same calendar year. Bowler Shaheen Afridi won the Garfield Sobers Trophy, the highest international award for men’s cricket, in 2021, and his father-in-law was captain of the Pakistan national team from 2009 to 2011. Team captain Babar Azam won the Sobers Trophy in 2022 and is the winningest captain ever in T20 international play.
And they lost to the United States of America, a country where most people do not even know how cricket is played, on Thursday. Do you believe in miracles?