1st over: Canada 6-0 (Johnson 4, Dhaliwal 1) Ali Khan bowls the first ball of the competition to Aaron Johnson, who hammers it impatiently through extra cover for four. That’s a cracking statement of intent.

Khan is a good bowler, slingy and sharp, and he beats Navnett Dhaliwal later in the over. Dhaliwal muscles a single to mid-on to get off the mark.

That’s a very good first over from Ali Khan. There wasn’t much wrong with the delivery that Johnson belted for four and everything else was on the money.

It’s almost time for the first ball of the 2024 T20 World Cup. Keep an eye out for Aaron Johnson, the Canada opener who can hit the ball miles.

The players line up for the anthems, which are sung lustily by some and a little shyly by others. A few of the players on both sides look really nervous. And so they should: most of them are about to play the biggest game of their careers to date.

“Evening from a sultry Toronto, Rob,” writes Guy Hornsby. “Seems strange to think the T20 World Cup is kicking off not far from my time zone. Here’s to a good one, and a decent opener, too. It’s finally at least enough teams to see the best of the associates too, which pleases me greatly. Though I’ve not seen a single reference to the game while up here.

“Anyway, after Yuvi’s distinctly bland Good Morning America slot, this is quite well done, so come on America, you need cricket in your life!”

Hang on, have you moved to Toronto?

The opening ceremony is fairly low-key, with no sign yet of Diana Ross breaking the stumps or anything like that. It’s hard to get a sense of the crowd on the TV coverage, though I’m sure that will become clearer once the game starts.

A beginner’s guide to this cricket thing

The question of whether cricket can crack America, as per the cliche, feels unlikely to be answered (not least on a subscription channel, Willow TV), although this T20 World Cup is not a one-off moonshot, rather one shoulder to the wheel of a broader push.

“The match referee Richie Richardson is older than me,” writes Gary Naylor. “How can he look that good?”

Kombucha and 500 squat thrusts a day apparently.

The teams

USA win the toss and bowl

Valley Ranch is just as much America as any other corner of the country, and the young Americans here love it just as much as the kids in other neighbourhoods do basketball, baseball, or any of the other games everyone else will be watching this weekend.

So, about that game in 1844

They all have their own stories about how they ended up here, playing for the USA. Some came because their parents wanted a better life, others to study, some for the money. Ali Khan is sending some of his earnings back to his old village of Jafar, in Pakistan, where he dreams of one day building a new cricket ground

What comes next on this list: Johannesburg, Lord’s, Guyana, Hambantota, Dhaka, Nagpur, Abu Dhabi, Sydney. The answer, of course, is Dallas, those being the venues for the opening game of the eight T20 World Cups to date.

Until recently, the idea of a cricket World Cup starting in America would have had them rolling in the aisles, but then the same was true of football/soccer before 1994.

Tonight’s opening game between USA and Canada is a step into the future and the past. USA v Canada is the oldest cricket fixture of all, dating back to 1844, a fact we know because it has been cited to within an inch of its life in the build-up to this game. And while the future’s not ours to see, there has never been a greater push to make cricket a small but stable part of American life.

Major League Cricket is growing apace, the US are co-hosting a World Cup – and they have a team that may well surprise plenty of people in the next couple of weeks. They beat Bangladesh 2-1 in a warm-up series, and their team is a handy mix of naturalised players like Corey Anderson and homegrown talents like Steven Taylor.

They also have Nitish Kumar, who played 18 T20 internationals for Canada between 2012 and 2019 before moving to the USA and eventually qualifying to play for them. That adds a bit of pepper to an already spicy rivalry, as does the fact the brilliant Sri Lankan Pubudu Dassanayake, once the USA coach, is now doing the same job for Canada.

Tonight’s winner sill have an outside chance of qualifying from a group that also includes India, Pakistan and Ireland. But a match like this exists in and of itself: as a contest and an event.

Rob will be here shortly. In the meantime, here’s Andy Bull on cricket’s status in the US:

Manhattan’s skyscrapers are built on cricket fields. There was one under Pier 17 at the Seaport on the East River, another beneath the North Meadow of Central Park, and a third right on 1st Avenue and East 32nd St, below the car park of NYU’s Langone Medical Center.

In 1844, a crowd of about 5,000 New Yorkers watched the first international match there, between the USA and Canada. “Cricket was the first modern team sport in America,” says Chuck Ramkissoon, in Joseph O’Neill’s great New York novel Netherland, “a bona fide American pastime”. He’s right. It was, once.

There were dozens, even hundreds, of clubs in the US in the middle of the 19th century. Historians have never settled on a single reason why cricket died there. The civil war was one factor. “We had a large number of good young men playing the game up to that time, and then the war fever took over them,” one player wrote in the American Cricketer at the beginning of the 20th century.

Baseball was an easier game for the soldiers to pick up and play because it didn’t need a rolled wicket, specialist coaching or equipment. When they made it professional in 1869, it was packaged and sold as the indigenous American sport. The patriots’ game.

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