• USA 197-3 beat Canada 194-5 by seven wickets in Dallas, Texas
• Jones (94*), Gous (65) guide co-hosts to win with 131-run stand

Build it, and they will come. The great American cricket experiment got underway on Saturday night, when the USA beat Canada by seven wickets in the opening match of the T20 World Cup at the little ground in Grand Prairie, Texas. And hell’s bells if it wasn’t, in its own little way, one of the game’s great occasions.

A crowd of around 5,000 were treated to a brilliantly freewheeling innings by the USA’s Aaron Jones, a pocket-rocket batsman who was born in Queens, and raised in Barbados. Jones clobbered 10 sixes, one of them clean out of the ground, in an undefeated innings of 94 off just 40 balls.

The two teams in the opening T20 World Cup match have a long and curious history and lay claim to a sporting milestone

Back, back, back, before anyone had invented Twenty20, before the Ashes and back beyond, before basketball had even been invented, and when baseball was still a little kids’ game, the 11 best cricketers in Toronto travelled south across the border to play a two-day game against the 11 best cricketers in the US.

It was September 1844, seven years before the first America’s Cup, 16 before the first Open championship and 33 before the first Test match. Which means Canada v USA, the opening fixture of this year’s World Cup, isn’t just the oldest international match in this sport, but, historians believe, the oldest in any sport.

It takes a while to discover locals aware of the tournament but the neighbourhood of Valley Ranch is talking about little else

It’s easy enough to find the little cricket ground hosting the opening game of the T20 World Cup, just take a right when you get to the three enormous chrome dinosaurs outside Ripley’s Believe it Or Not! and follow the road round past its multicoloured replica of the Taj Mahal. The harder part is finding anyone who knows anything about what they’re doing over there under the floodlights. “It’s dead today,” says the lady behind the car rental desk at Dallas Fort Worth international airport. “Is there anything going on this weekend?” Her colleague doesn’t look up. “Nope,” he says, “I checked.”

The T20 World Cup has arrived in the USA with all the fanfare of a broken kazoo. Whatever else the ICC spent its Saudi oil sponsorship on, it isn’t on-the-ground advertising here in Dallas. The 28 June Popsicle Parade in Saddlehorn Park has a bigger billboard presence on the streets around the ground. It’s only when you get inside the venue that you’d know there’s a World Cup on.

In the first of a series of special features, we look at how a sport buried by the American civil war is undergoing a revival

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.

• US tournament’s expansion from six to 10 teams will mean clash
• ‘In 10 years you’ll see a different landscape,’ says chief executive

Major League Cricket has announced ambitious new expansion plans for the sport in the US. In a move that will have significant implications for the landscape of the professional sport in England, MLC, which began with a 19-game season, has confirmed it will expand to 34 games by 2025.

The US league now has six franchises but plans to launch two more in the near future, and two more soon after that. The announcement comes just after MLC has been fully legitimised by the news that its matches have been awarded List A status by the International Cricket Council.

World No 1’s unlikely brush with the law has raised his profile to a level that his playing abilities alone would never be able to

For 27 years, 10 months, and 26 days the most interesting thing about Scottie Scheffler was his golf. And given that’s what he’s paid for, you might think it ought to be enough. But the truth is that ever since Scheffler rose to the top of the world rankings in March 2022 the game has wanted more from him. Trouble is, besides his faith, his family, and his attachment to a beaten-up old 2012 GMC Yukon, he does not have much else to give. Whisper it, but the truth is that a lot of people in the game worry that Scheffler, who many reckon is the best player of his generation, is just a little bit too boring to carry the sport.

And then he decided to take a detour into the westbound lane on his way through the gates to Valhalla on Friday morning. Last month Scheffler explained that he believed his victory at the Masters was meant to be because God had laid out “today’s plans many years ago, and I could do nothing to mess them up”. Well, either the Lord also takes his marching orders from Kentucky traffic cops, or this is more proof, if we needed it, that he moves in mysterious ways.