The whistles of the cricket fans dressed in yellow rang louder than the cheers of the orange-clad home team supporters as the Texas Super Kings defeated the San Francisco Unicorns at the Oakland Coliseum on Wednesday in the Unicorns’ first home game of this season of Major League Cricket.
Major League Cricket is an American professional cricket league that is currently in its fourth season.
The league features six teams — including the San Francisco Unicorns — with players from all over the world participating. At Wednesday’s game, Texas Super Kings beat the Unicorns by 22 runs, handing the home team a loss in their return to the Coliseum.
The Coliseum stadium, former home of the Athletics team in Major League Baseball, is the home ground for the San Francisco Unicorns for the second season running this summer, after debuting as a venue in the 2025 season of Major League Cricket. Pomona, Calif., and Dallas are the two other venues hosting matches this year.
The Unicorns will play home games this evening against the Seattle Orcas and on Sunday against the Washington Freedom before playing on the road for the reminder of the regular season. The Coliseum will also host playoff and final matches from July 15-18.
“I love what they’ve done here,” said Mark Milbourne, a cricket-loving Australian who moved to the Bay Area in 2001 and lives in Walnut Creek. “That they actually made the pitch into a proper cricket pitch.”
The pitch Milbourne referred to is a 20-meter strip of turf in the middle of the ground, on which the game is played. Unlike the somewhat similar sport of baseball, the ball bounces once before reaching the batter in cricket. So, for a competitive game of cricket, the grass on the pitch needs to be of a certain quality and length, posing a logistical challenge in transforming venues like Coliseum that were not originally built for cricket, into cricket grounds. The solution is to prepare a pitch off-site and then use cranes to install it in the middle of the ground.
“It’s a $350,000 cost to drop the pitch in and take it out every season,” said tournament director Justin Geale. “We’ve created a little nursery in the back of the car park, and they sit there,” he added about maintaining the pitch for the rest of the year.
While Geale would not reveal the exact cost of renting the stadium for the duration of the season, he said that it entailed “multiple millions of dollars.”
“But we think it’s worth it to really invest in the Bay,” said Geale. “There are a lot of cricket fans here already, and a lot of sponsors are here, driven by Silicon Valley tech. That marrying up of tech and MLC is really important.”
Many former and current executives of large tech firms like Microsoft, Adobe, Meta, and Google are among the founding investors of Major League Cricket. The San Francisco Unicorns is owned by Bay Area entrepreneurs Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan. Geale also pointed out that the Bay Area is home to diasporas from South Asia, the Caribbean Islands, Australia, and the United Kingdom, where the sport enjoys popularity.
But drawing crowds to the Coliseum has been a challenge: only 2,817 tickets were sold for Wednesday’s match. The fact that the FIFA World Cup is taking place at the same time does not help, Geale said, but he hopes that the matches in July will be better attended.
“We sold out the final for 7,000 people in Texas for the past three years, so we’d love to get 10,000-plus here for the final,” said Geale.
San Francisco Unicorns fans like Milbourne hope that the Coliseum will continue to be the team’s home ground going forward.
“I’m glad we got it here,” Milbourne said. “Now, I can actually go to a game, which is always much more fun than watching it on television.”
The players agree. “It’s great to have home fan support,” said Unicorns player Brody Crouch in the post-game press conference about playing at the Coliseum. “I love it, it could be my favorite place to play!”
But the uncertainty surrounding the ownership structure of the Oakland Coliseum makes it difficult for Geale and his team to plan long-term. As things stand, the Athletics baseball team owns a 50% share in the Coliseum property, while the city of Oakland owns the other half. In 2024, the city of Oakland approved a deal to sell its half to the Oakland Acquisition Company, an affiliate of the Oakland-based African American Sports and Entertainment Group, but the deal has not yet gone through. Last month, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors agreed to a complicated term sheet that would see the county purchase the A’s’ half on the condition that the Oakland Acquisition Company then buy it back from the county.
There is also the issue of a lawsuit brought by the environmental nonprofit Communities for a Better Environment, which alleges that the county violated the state Surplus Lands Act by selling its half-interest in the site to the A’s in 2019 without first giving public notice or trying to build affordable housing. The term sheet with the county stipulates that the OAC will secure the dismissal of the lawsuit before the June 30 closing date for the deal. It is unclear when the sale of the city of Oakland’s half of the property will be completed.
“We’d like to keep coming back and make this a Unicorns home for the future,” said Geale. “At the moment, with the uncertainty around the ownership, it’s unknown.”