180 years on, US vs Canada get ready to rumble

CHENNAI : The year was 1844. A famous French artist, Georges Seurat, was busy creating a painting, which would later be declared one of his masterpieces, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte”. Not so far away from France, in Vienna, Austria, the Waltz King of classical music, Johann Strauss II, was busy composing “Poems of the Senses or Epigrams”. In India, the sentiments against their rulers were boiling below the surface, which ultimately led to a revolt a decade later.

However, mainland America was away from all of this. The USA was getting ready to vote in their 15th Presidential election in November of 1844. A month before the country could vote for Democrat James K. Polk as the 11th President, other history was in the making on the cricket fields in New York. That is when the United States of America faced the British Empire’s Canadian Province in the world’s first international cricket match in the Big Apple, almost 33 years before the long-standing Ashes rivalry between England and Australia could ignite.

It was a time when, cricket, the sport brought to North America by British colonisers in the 1700s, was gaining traction. Philadelphia, the largest city in Pennsylvania, was the epicentre of the cricketing action. While the match was scheduled to happen in the Fall of 1844, this match could have easily been played four years earlier when St George’s Cricket Club of New York received an invitation from one Mr Phillpotts to play a game against Toronto in Canada.