Is America slowly becoming a cricket-playing country? This interesting NYT video shows how immigrants from South East Asia have developed cricket leagues in New York. After the surprise success of Netherland, Joseph O’Neill’s award-winning novel about a cricketing subculture in New York, is a pattern emerging? The USA Cricket Association says that cricket is “the fastest growing sport in America.”

Some American conservatives might buckle at reports of this quintessentially limey sport being played on their soil by immigrants from the developing world. I mean, how UnAmerican can you get?

In fact, however, cricket has a long-running and well-established heritage in the land of the free — George Washington is understood to have played some variant of the game. In shedding their British colonial yoke, Americans did not immediately also divest themselves of their interest in cricket. The game was popular in early days of the Republic, and has enjoyed several revivals at various stages American history.

Baseball, obviously, won out in the long run. But the possible (admittedly, still highly unlikely) return of cricket should need not be a cause of right-wing frowning. Cricket is at heart a conservative pastime: it is, in its traditional format, a very slow game, demanding patience and a dispassionate temperament. There is an old theory that cricket is one reason Britain never experienced revolution: the idea being that the village cricket match bound the rural classes together, the butcher could play against the country squire as an equal and so on.

That’s almost certainly rubbish. Perhaps, however, cricket, with its equanimous, soothing charm – its association with a gently declining empire — is just what America now needs. Or is it simply too alien to suit the modern American character?