Christina Hoag, writing for the Associated Press, tells us about 'the Homies and the Popz', Compton Cricket Club's talented team. The first team from the US to tour Australia, they hail from a city on Los Angeles' southern border known more for gangsta rap and gang shootings. Check out the video here.

Compton Cricket Club players have sipped tea with Prince Edward at Buckingham Palace, played against Aborigines in the Australian outback, and swapped stories of violence-torn neighborhoods with residents of Belfast. At home, though, it's another story ... Several players sport tattoos saying "cricket outta Compton" and "from gats to bats" ("gats" is street slang for guns). The team raps cricket-themed songs titled "Shots" and "Bullets". A couple players have served jail terms. One missed the Australian trip because he was on parole. Another was killed in a driveby shooting.

The game's etiquette has helped them mature beyond the confines of urban street culture ... The Cazarez brothers, whose third brother Jesse was killed in the driveby, said the sport's emphasis on accepting the umpire's call helped them cope. "If something doesn't go your way, keep your head high and just go with it," said Ricardo Cazarez, 26. "Life's not fair sometimes".

There is a lot of cricket in southwestern Connecticut, says Cathryn J Prince, writing in Darien.patch.com. She catches up with some of the locals who are fascinated by the sport and gives us a glimpse into life on the pitches of Fairfield County.

Peter Smith, 14, started playing in sixth grade after watching Lagaan, a sports-themed Bollywood movie, in school for a unit on India. “I’ve always been interested in British sports,” Peter said. Smith immersed himself in the sport by watching YouTube. Then he organised a few foreign-born students — kids from India, England, and Guyana — to play at recess. At home in Oxford he plays on a homemade pitch and travels hours to find teams to play on.

...There are many reasons players play. Part of the attraction for [Neil] Kimberly is the intellectual challenge. “There is certainly a degree of fascination with it. It has a certain mystique with it—all these players dressed in white,” Kimberly said. “There is also an assumption that it’s a slow moving game. But it’s an interesting combination of baseball and chess.”

Cricket is still to make make big strides in the USA but Peter Della Penna, writing on the website dreamcricket.com observes that visitors have reacted positively to experiencing cricket for the first time at National Baseball Hall of Fame.

“I’d love to go see a full game actually,” said 45-year-old Karen Knights of Raymond, Maine. Knights was with her husband Rodney and 13-year-old daughter Megan on a day out to discover baseball history when they came across the Swinging Away display. The entire family was quite intrigued by the differences between baseball and cricket.

No, it's not the Ashes. Instead Randy Boswell in the Montreal Gazette looks at the history of cricket between Canada and the United States.

"It was the world’s first documented nation-versus-nation sporting event, a September 1844 contest in New York City between Canada and the United States.

No, not baseball. Not hockey. Cricket. That’s right — flat bat, wickets and whites.

Now, 167 years after the landmark match that blazed a trail for soccer’s World Cup and the Olympics — including Sidney Crosby’s gold-medal moment against the U.S. at last year’s Winter Games in Vancouver — the two countries that made sports history at Manhattan’s long-disappeared Bloomingdale Park are poised to revive their cricketing rivalry in a head-to-head series this spring."

The first-ever western regional tournament for college cricket teams, including squads from the University of Southern California; California State University, Long Beach, and the University of California, Davis was held at Woodley Park in Lake Balboa over the weekend. According to a report in the Daily News, the organisers believe such intercollegiate contests - among clubs dominated by Indian and Pakistani students - are the best way to build cricket's popularity in the United States.

Twenty20 is the sped-up version of the sport in which games last about three hours, more palatable to Americans than the oft-joked-about five-day format of international matches.

Tom Melville writes an open letter to Don Lockerbie, the CEO of the USA Cricket Association, on dreamcricket.com, warning him of how difficult it will be to make cricket popular among Americans.

For anyone to claim “I’m going to turn America into a cricket playing country” is tantamount to claiming, “I’m going to turn America into a Spanish speaking country; I’m going to turn America into a Muslim country.” A pretty tough row to hoe! Expectations must be brutally realistic; efforts must be highly imaginative; planning must be exceptionally creative.

Know that America is not a “cricket culture,” it’s a culture that does not know, does not care about, and, in many ways, is hostile towards cricket. No matter how much experience, no matter how much “expertise” anyone may have accumulated in a cricket culture, he will soon discover they’re virtually worthless here, and can never be a substitute for hands-on, face-to-face, experience working with Americans at cricket.

The Staten Island field in New York may not have quite the same pedigree as Lord’s or Eden Gardens, but cricket has been played there for well over a century. Last month the Staten Island Cricket Club took on a visiting team from Merion, Pennsylvania in a rematch of the first game played at the ground almost 125 years ago. Writing in the New York Times, Alan Feuer pays tribute to the enduring nature of this cricketing outpost.

It was, as people said all day, approaching the 125th year of continual cricket at the field, once a portion of the Delafield estate but now owned by the city and known as Walker Park. The players who came out that day were not the British officers of yore, but Bangladeshi cabbies, Indian computer engineers and a Pakistani man who owns an auto-body shop. The Ladies’ Outdoor Amusement Club was not on hand to administer refreshments. Instead, there was D.J. Ralphie, of the so-called Chutney Bastards, blasting rowdy soca from a laptop.

“This is a momentous occasion,” said Clarence Modeste, president of the Staten Island squad. Mr. Modeste, a tall, slim man who is 80 and a native of Tobago, recognized the afternoon with a heartfelt introduction delivered to the teams, both dressed in their blazers and lined up facing one another on the field.

In the Wall Street Journal Richard Lord looks at the age-old question of whether cricket can take off in America. He says an opportunity was missed for the sport to showcase itself during the recent Twenty20 series in Florida, where the poor track resulted in tiny totals.

Unfortunately, the series itself, which was drawn 1-1, was far from ideal. Despite the groundsman's best efforts, the all-important pitch was low and slow, making it hard for batsmen to time their shots and resulting in exceptionally low scores and the more or less total absence of the sort of baseball-style slugging that was supposed to sell Twenty20 to the wider American public.

Then there were the two teams themselves. Neither is the most eye-catching in international cricket and, worse, neither country has a sizable diaspora in the U.S., let alone in Florida. An India-Pakistan match-up fought in New York or Los Angeles, or a West Indies contest held in Florida, would have drawn bigger crowds.

As New Zealand prepare to play Sri Lanka in Florida, Huw Richards examines cricket’s latest attempt to conquer the United States in the New York Times,

This weekend will be an early test. New Zealand plans regular visits under a strategic partnership reached in November. Two New Zealand coaches, including former test player Dipak Patel, were at a national training camp before Christmas. The U.S.A.C.A. has also held talks with Pakistan’s cricket authorities.

Obama admitted to not knowing much about cricket, but Lockerbie is fond of an anecdote suggesting that the job title has cricketing roots. “When the founding fathers discussed what to call the chief executive of the United States, John Adams said that the most respected man in a New England village was the president of the cricket club, and we owe having a president to that.”

Writing for Cricket365, Shahida Jacobs takes a tongue-in-cheek look at how an American commentator might translate cricket terminology into something Americans can understand.

While many cricket lovers consider the Twenty20 format "pyjama baseball", I for one would love it if they employ an American commentator to add even further to the entertainment with their different terminology. Of course, some words like Powerplay and Timeout are already part and parcel of the Twenty20 game, but there are heaps of others that you should get used to.

I've had the pleasure (or is that displeasure?) of watching quite a few Major Soccer League games on ESPN (don't get me started on Tommy Smith with a 'y') and some of the words the commentators use are quite confusing.

Goalkeepers are goaltenders, a red card is an ejection, a penalty is a PK (always good, those abbreviations), a half is called a period and clean sheets are known as shutouts.

Best we look ahead, then, at the terminology we can expect to hear over the weekend

In the BBC news magazine, Tom Geoghegan looks at the efforts to spread cricket in the USA. He gets the views of Don Lockerbie, chief executive of the USA Cricket Association, and sports historian David Brooks to understand whether the game can take root in the sports-crazy country.

American sports fans can't stand a draw, or a tie as they call it, Brooks says. They always play until there's a winner, so the concept of playing five days and not having a result is completely alien.

Today's demographics also count against cricket taking off, because the fast-growing Latino community prefers soccer and baseball.

On the other hand, the sport has some things going for it - plenty of time for adverts and lots of statistics, which Americans love.

When Imran Khan Suddahazai migrated to Saratoga four years back, bidding adieu to the cricket aspirations he nurtured back home in England, he would not have expected the game to follow him. But after a chance, successful, stint as the coach of the California Cricket Academy boys, and another with the men’s team who reached the finals of a regional tournament, a role with the senior USA team was only to be expected. That happened in 2008 when he was appointed the senior manager of the side. Now, Imran will take his team, made up of a mix of amateurs, expats and enthusiasts, to Dubai as they attempt to qualify for the World Cup. Speaking to MercuryNews.com, Imran Khan expressed his delight at the small yet significant strides being made by his adopted home in the game of cricket.

"It’s a huge, huge, huge thing. I can't emphasize it enough or put enough adjectives or superlatives because outside of the U.S., all the major countries play cricket. It's a culture thing. The growth of the game in this country, the media interest it could spark, and the sponsorship it could bring. It would create an image for the U.S. without the average person in the U.S. even knowing.”

"Maybe those in the U.S. don't care or don't know about it. But for the team to make it to the World Cup is huge because we know what the world is expecting and how they view us. It will give us some form of credibility."