The new year is a time for making ambitious resolutions and recalibrating one’s approach to life. That holds true at the University of Miami Patti and Allan Herbert Business School, but not everyone has forgotten a 2023 event that sent elation, and heartbreak, rippling throughout the business school.
Specifically, on November 19, 2023, Australia handily defeated India by six wickets to clinch the ICC Cricket World Cup title. The cricket championship game was played in India and was closely monitored by scores of Miami Herbert staffers and students, thanks to the business school’s strong international presence.
However, with each passing day, Miami Herbert’s cricket contingent is gradually shifting its gaze from November 2023 to June 2024. Because in five months, the International Cricket Committee is slated to hold two championship cricket games in South Florida for the first time, at the Broward County Stadium, in Lauderhill.
For some Miami Herbert students and faculty, June can’t come fast enough.
“Whether it’s Australia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, South Africa, all of these countries play cricket and do so quite intensively,” said Miami Herbert vice dean of business programs Harihara Natarajan. “As it turns out, at the Miami Herbert Business School, we have a fair representation of these countries, both on the faculty side and on the student side,” added Natarajan, who hails from the southern Indian city of Chennai. “So, there’s a fever pitch, if you will, when the World Cup comes around.”
As luck would have it, two of Natarajan’s departmental colleagues are from Australia. “So, I have to face them every day knowing that we lost to Australia in the final,” Natarajan laughed. “There’s a little bit of banter going around, and I’m on the losing end of that. I don’t have any bragging rights at the moment.”
“Hari (Natarajan) has been avoiding me for a while now,” one of the Aussies, professor of management Marie Dasborough, noted in a tongue-in-cheek email. “There was a time when he would be enthusiastic to talk about cricket, but not anymore.”
Perhaps it was an omen that India reached the cricket championships because Natarajan has been helping University of Miami President Julio Frenk attract more Indian undergraduate and graduate students to Miami Herbert.
“President Frenk has this vision of us having greater and more significant partnerships with India,” Natarajan said. “I’m part of a task force he’s put together for India.
“To help us to get known better in India, to facilitate connections, we’re creating memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with Indian students, and partnerships with Indian universities that will create strong pipelines of high-quality students for our programs.
“After Chinese students, Indian students are the second-largest group in terms of students seeking to go abroad for graduate opportunities,” Natarajan said, adding that he’d signed five Indian students to MOUs and was working to secure two more. “So, it makes sense for us to go there and see how well we can address the market.”
Natarajan joked that he wasn’t aiding Frenk as part of a surreptitious plan to place “more passionate Indian supporters” of cricket, a sport with 2.5 billion fans worldwide, in the business school.
In some regards, cricket is beguilingly like baseball, as both sports are played with bats and balls. In other ways, the two games couldn’t be more dissimilar.
In baseball, teams typically have nine innings to score as many runs as possible before they record 27 outs, with contestants allowed to make three outs per inning. In cricket, each team is allowed to make 10 outs per inning. Yes, cricket and baseball both have pitchers, but cricket pitchers can toss along the ground, as well as through the air.
Baseball bats are cylindrical, while cricket bats are flat, which makes it somewhat easier to make contact with pitched balls. In baseball, a batter who hits a homerun can drive in anywhere from one run, to four runs, depending on how many teammates are on base. In cricket, homeruns put six runs on the scoreboard.
But as Miami Herbert can attest, here’s where cricket and baseball fail to differ one iota: Both sports create rabid fans who can wind up over the moon, or down in the dumps, depending on their team’s performance.
When June rolls around, Miami Herbert’s cricket aficionados will be able to drive a few miles up Interstate 95 to support their heroes, as opposed to watching televised matches at 3 a.m. in the morning, which was the case when the championship games were in India last year.
Whatever the outcome in June, you can bet that good-natured trash talk will flow through Miami Herbert’s officers and classrooms after a new cricket champion is crowned. And that will hold true regardless of whether India and Australia both return to the championships or fail to make it.
