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A team of immigrant cricketers represents the USA at the 2026 T20 World Cup
The 15 cricketers selected to represent the US at the 2026 World Cup were mostly born in India and Pakistan or have direct family roots there
By The Immigrant Times
The United States Men's National Cricket Team qualified for the 2026 ICC Men's T20 World Cup by reaching the Super 8 stage during the 2024 tournament
February 2026: At the International Cricket Council (ICC) Men's T20 Cricket World Cup, which is being played across India and Sri Lanka this February and March, 55 matches, 20 nations, billions of viewers: one team on the fixture list might surprise. The US is playing cricket at a World Cup.
Team USA is a legitimate participant in one of the world's most-watched sporting events, having qualified directly on the strength of a breakthrough performance at the previous edition in 2024. Who the US cricketers are, where they came from, and what they represent is a remarkable immigrant story in today’s American sport.
T20 cricket, a sport followed by billions
Cricket is among the most widely followed sports on earth, with an estimated 2.5 billion fans globally: a figure that exceeds those for American football or baseball. It is the national sport of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, and a central part of the cultural life of several Caribbean nations. In India and Pakistan, cricket occupies a place in public life with few equivalents elsewhere: matches between the two countries are among the most-watched sporting events in human history.
T20, short for Twenty20, is the shortest and most dynamic form of the game. Each team bats for a single innings of 20 overs, producing roughly three hours of play that lends itself naturally to broadcast television and, increasingly, to streaming. The ICC Men's T20 World Cup, held every two years, brings together 20 national teams in a tournament whose viewership, in the countries that follow cricket most closely, is comparable to that of the FIFA Football World Cup. The 2026 edition, the tenth, is co-hosted by India and Sri Lanka and runs from 7 February to 8 March 2026.
Team USA and its players
Of the 15 cricketers selected to represent the US, most were born in India or Pakistan or have direct family roots there. The remainder comes from South Africa and Sri Lanka. They include software engineers and restaurant owners, established franchise owners and young talent, men who emigrated to build new lives in America and carried their sport with them.
Monank Patel, the captain, was born in Anand, Gujarat, and played age-group cricket for the state before the path to professional cricket in India narrowed. He moved to New Jersey in 2016 to open a restaurant. His USA debut came in 2018, and he steadily established himself as one of the team's most reliable batsmen and, in time, its leader. It was under his captaincy that the USA recorded its most celebrated result: a victory over Pakistan at the 2024 World Cup, played on American soil.
The most striking individual story in the squad may belong to Saurabh Netravalkar, the left-arm fast bowler. Born in Mumbai to Goan parents, Netravalkar was a high-level cricketer in India, the leading wicket-taker at the 2010 ICC Under-19 World Cup, alongside players who would go on to represent the senior Indian team.
Breaking into Mumbai's intensely competitive senior side proved beyond him; however, when Cornell University offered him a place to study computer science, he accepted and moved to the United States in 2015. By his own account, he did not expect to play competitive cricket again. He completed his master's degree, joined Oracle in San Francisco as a software engineer, and resumed playing at weekends. He is now the most experienced international cricketer on the USA roster, a man who set the game aside, crossed the world for an education and a career, and found his way back to the highest level through the immigrant cricket networks of the American suburbs.
Ali Khan, the fast bowler, was born and raised in Attock, Punjab, Pakistan, and moved to Ohio with his family in 2010. He had largely set cricket aside when a club match in Dayton rekindled his interest. He pursued the game with increasing seriousness, eventually relocating to Florida, and earned a place in the Caribbean Premier League in 2016, dismissing Sri Lankan legend Kumar Sangakkara with his very first delivery in professional cricket.
He has since played franchise T20 cricket across multiple continents and remains one of the more experienced members of the USA attack. His Pakistani background has introduced a contemporary complication: ahead of the 2026 tournament in India, he and several teammates of Pakistani origin encountered visa difficulties, casting brief doubt over their participation.
Nosthush Kenjige was born in Alabama but raised in Karnataka, India, before returning to the United States in 2015, where he has worked as a hospital technician. Ehsan Adil represented Pakistan in international cricket between 2013 and 2015 before emigrating to the United States and qualifying to represent his adopted country.
The squad's non-South-Asian members: South Africans Andries Gous and Shadley Van Schalkwyk, and Sri Lankan-born Shehan Jayasuriya, reflect the broader, multinational character of American cricket, assembled from the cricketing diasporas of several continents.
Cricket’s Team USA and America’s South Asian communities
The US cricketers, playing at the highest level of the game, are the sporting representatives of one of the fastest-growing communities in the United States. According to South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) and the US Census Bureau, nearly 5.4 million people in the US trace their heritage to South Asia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and neighbouring countries.
Indians constitute the largest group, estimated at over four million. Pakistanis number close to 700,000. Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans and Nepalis form significant communities in their own right.
The South Asian American population has grown by approximately 40 per cent in recent years and represents one of the fastest-growing immigrant groups in the country, concentrated principally in the New York metropolitan area, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Houston, Dallas and Washington DC
South Asian Americans are also among the most highly educated immigrant communities in America, with a substantial proportion employed in technology, medicine, finance and business. The presence on a national cricket squad of a Cornell-educated Oracle engineer, or a Gujarat-born restaurateur serving as captain, reflects something real about the community from which this team is drawn.
Cricket in the United States has expanded steadily to serve this diaspora. Major League Cricket, launched in 2023, fields franchises in cities from Los Angeles to New York. International-standard venues operate in Florida, Texas and North Carolina. The infrastructure, once almost non-existent, is beginning to take shape.
The US Cricket 2026 World Cup squad
Monank Patel (captain): wicketkeeper-batsman, born in Gujarat, India
Andries Gous: wicketkeeper-batsman, born in South Africa
Shehan Jayasuriya: batsman, born in Sri Lanka
Milind Kumar: batsman, born in India
Shayan Jahangir: batsman, born in Pakistan
Saiteja Mukkamala: batsman, born in India
Sanjay Krishnamurthi: all-rounder, born in India
Harmeet Singh: all-rounder, born in India
Nosthush Kenjige: all-rounder, born USA (raised in India)
Shadley Van Schalkwyk: all-rounder, born in South Africa
Saurabh Netravalkar: bowler, born in Mumbai, India
Ali Khan: bowler, born Attock, Pakistan
Mohammad Mohsin: bowler, born in Pakistan
Shubham Ranjane: bowler, born in India
Ehsan Adil: bowler, formerly represented Pakistan
Fazit
The presence of the United States at a major cricket World Cup does not signal that cricket has entered the American sporting mainstream. It does, however, indicate the scale and consolidation of South Asian and other cricket-playing diasporas in the country. Team USA is not an anomaly. It reflects migration patterns, professional mobility, and community infrastructure. In that sense, the squad is less a sporting curiosity than a demographic fact.
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