Professional cricket has arrived in the USA. On June 18, American Professional Cricket (APC) launches an eight-team league, with an impressive array of international players lined up.

The league will have an Eastern Conference, with teams in New York, New Jersey, Washington DC and South Florida, and a Western Conference featuring Chicago, Texas (Houston), San Francisco and Los Angeles. Each team will play six games, facing each of their conference rivals once at home and once on the road.

The top two teams in each conference will meet in a play-off, with the two winners going on to the championship game in early September. An All-Star game is slated for late July or August, with Las Vegas rumored to be the likely venue.

The games will have a one-day, 20-overs format, which should keep the duration down to around three hours.

It's been a long time coming. Although most American sports fans, if they've heard of it at all, might well regard cricket as a quaint, arcane English game that could never interest them, it was a different story in the mid 19th century. Back then, it was America's most popular spectator sport, with a particularly strong following in New York and Philadelphia. The world's first international cricket game was a US-Canada clash in 1840.

But as the professional, mass-audience era of sports came along, cricket in the US was overtaken by baseball, and it only survived as a little-known amateur sport. Meanwhile, it grew into a major sport in other parts of the world -- not only in its native England, but also in the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, southern Africa, and especially in southern Asia where it inspires an almost religious fervor.

For much of the 20th century, cricket's London-based rulers refused to cooperate in the development of the game anywhere outside the British Empire and its recent colonies, stifling any lingering hopes that it could grow as a professional sport in the USA.

Times have changed, though, and now the more cosmopolitan and forward-looking worldwide governing body, the International Cricket Council (ICC), is keen to develop and promote the game in countries where it doesn't yet have a high profile. Nowhere appeals to them more than the USA, with its vast resources, vibrant sports culture and lucrative media market. As well as the launch of APC, there's the prospect of some games in the 2007 World Cup being played in the USA, although the tournament will be primarily staged in the West Indies.

Still, a bit of caution is in order. If anyone thinks cricket will easily find a place at the top table of the American sports world, they should take a look at the history of soccer in the USA. Major League Soccer is just the latest in a long series of attempts at establishing the game in America, and it's only been moderately successful.

Cricket could be even tougher to sell, to a public that already has plenty of sports on its plate. It's perceived as an English game rather than a global one, and has a reputation for being slow and long-winded. These perceptions may be misguided, but APC will have its work cut out as it tries to overcome them.

The facts and figures about cricket's grass-roots presence in America are impressive -- there are around 600 clubs, with the number of registered players estimated at anything from 10,000 to 15,000. The vast majority of these players are from immigrant communities with recent roots in cricket's heartlands, mainly the West Indies and southern Asia. Initially, at least, these communities are likely to provide the bulk of APC's audience. The league's biggest challenge will be to reach beyond this core following, into the mainstream American population.

Exposure in the media will be crucial. A TV deal is reported to have been agreed -- if the coverage is easily available (and not on pay-per-view), this could be a huge boon for the new league.

The initial response of the US sports media to the announcement of APC's launch has been practically non-existent. The next day, scanning through the web sites of the major newspapers in the eight teams' markets, there was no sign of it at all. Perhaps there's a wall of skepticism and cynicism that needs to be overcome -- "first we had to deal with soccer, now this ..." -- or perhaps the sports editors just don't know how to react to it at all, and they've chosen the easy option of ignoring it.

As with soccer in the USA, one of the difficulties will be in recruiting players good enough to attract a big audience. Without high-quality players, who will turn up to watch? And if there aren't enough people watching, how can the league find enough money to lure high-quality players?

In this respect, APC is getting off to a good start. There are some genuine world-class current and recent international players on the rosters, such as Ramnaresh Sarwan and Shivnarine Chanderpaul of the West Indies, the Indian stars Dinesh Mongia and Parthiv Patel, and the big-hitting Lance Klusener from South Africa.

The salaries are reported to be up to $60,000 for a season. Admittedly, we often hear about athletes who are paid more than this in a week -- but cricket isn't the most lucrative of sports, and at an average of $10,000 per game, this kind of money won't be easy to resist. TV and sponsorship money will clearly be crucial in financing these salaries.

Another factor in APC's favor is that the worldwide market for players in cricket isn't as intense as in soccer, or as financially challenging for an emerging league with moderate resources. The league has a short season, and takes place at a time of year when most of the major Cricket nations are in their off-season. Foreign players will be able to perform in the USA without giving up their careers elsewhere.

As cricket is a sport where international games take precedence over domestic league games, some of the overseas players might not be fully committed to the APC schedule. Sarwan and Chanderpaul, for example, are likely to be needed in the West Indies squad for their tour of England during most of this summer.

Each team will have a maximum of five foreign players, ensuring that a reasonable number of homegrown cricketers will play regularly. The opportunity for Americans to compete professionally, alongside and against players of such a high caliber, should give a boost to the progress of the US national team -- and help to attract a wider audience.

Altogether, American Professional Cricket seems to be going about its tough task in the right way, starting out cautiously with a modestly-sized league and a light schedule, with a 20-over format which will allow games to be completed in a manageable timeslot. The need to have experienced, proven star players on the rosters has been balanced sensibly against the need to allow American players to develop their skills alongside them.

Baseball may have little to worry about, but if APC proves to be viable over the next few years, with the World Cup in 2007 providing a focal point and a target for American players to become competitive with some of the world's best, then there just might be a chance for professional cricket to find a happy niche in the American sports world.