Photo courtesy of Debjit Lahiri
Debjit Lahiri - 2023 Cricket World Cup Final
Debjit Lahiri at the 2023 Cricket World Cup Final in Ahmedabad, India
Milwaukee’s Debjit Lahiri is keeping the untold stories of cricket alive with Forgotten Cricket Memories, an Instagram-based archive that shares the bat-and-ball sport’s global legacy by way of nostalgic stories and profound historical moments. “Cricket is more than a sport—it’s a cultural heartbeat,” Lahiri says. Forgotten Cricket Memories, which currently has over 78,000 followers, is non-monetized, organically built out of Lahiri’s sheer love for the game.
Invented in 16th century England, cricket is the second most-watched sport in the world behind soccer, particularly popular in South Asian countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka as well South Africa, Australia and the West Indies. Cricket has not traditionally been a popular sport in the U.S., with Lahiri citing a couple reasons why being the cultural impact of baseball, another bat-and-ball sport, as well as waning interest in cricket following U.S. independence from Britain.
Photo courtesy of Debjit Lahiri
Germantown Cricket Club (Philidephia)
The Germantown Cricket Club in Philadelphia, the second oldest cricket club in the U.S.
However, Lahiri assures that U.S. interest in cricket is emerging, especially with growing South Asian and Caribbean immigrant communities. The U.S. established Major League Cricket in 2023, plus Team USA is returning for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
Lahiri is from Kolkata, India, where he attests cricket “is almost like a religion,” owing to the sport’s ability to unify such a large and diverse nation. “My grandfather was a big cricket fan, and I grew up watching cricket with him,” he recalls. “In the ‘90s, the game of cricket became very commercialized in India, so there was a lot of it on television and marketing around the game.”
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Having grown up in this period, Lahiri developed a lifelong passion for cricket. Fast forward to 2020, Lahiri revisited a handful of memorable cricket matches from his childhood and decided to write about them on social media.
”Nostalgia resonates with a lot of Internet users,” he affirms. “The first story I wrote received a lot of traction, and that’s when I thought it would be good to preserve all these memories.”
Lahiri subsequently created Forgotten Cricket Memories as his platform to do just that. In addition to documenting memorable cricket games from his youth, Lahiri has expanded its content by archiving games from before his time, conducting interviews with cricket players and fellow enthusiasts, and sharing historical trivia and old news clippings about the game.
Once he moved to the U.S. in 2024, Lahiri began to focus on uncovering our country’s own history of cricket, pointing to the legendary 19th century clubs of Hollywood and Philadelphia as well as the game’s emerging modern popularity via grassroots revival in cities like Los Angeles and New York.
“Back in the 1850’s, Milwaukee had a cricket club that had close to 150 members,” Lahiri notes. “There was a match between the Chicago club and the Milwaukee club that was attended by Abraham Lincoln.”
Milwaukee does in fact have its own cricket league today as well - the Milwaukee Premier League - which plays its home games at Abendschein Park in Oak Creek.
