The Oakland Coliseum, the iconic former home of the Oakland Athletics baseball team, has been selected to host nine matches during the 2025 Major League Cricket (MLC) season.
BBC Sport said the stadium, which has also previously hosted football and American football matches, will have a reduced capacity of 12,000 spectators when it hosts cricket for the first time.
The Athletics played at the Coliseum in the Bay Area, California for 56 years before leaving in 2024 as part of the franchise’s move to Las Vegas.
The 63,000-capacity Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum is a multipurpose stadium in Oakland, California, United States. It is part of the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Complex with the adjacent 19,200-capacity Oakland Arena near Interstate 880.
It will host the opening MLC match on 12 June, as San Francisco Unicorns meet last year’s winners Washington Freedom, and eight further matches, including two more Unicorns home fixtures.
MLC matches will also be played for the first time at the 25,000 Broward County Stadium in Florida, which has been preferred to Church Street Park in Morrisville, North Carolina.
Broward County Stadium opened on November 9, 2007, at a construction cost of $70 million.
The stadium was the first U.S. cricket pitch to receive certification by the International Cricket Council (ICC) to host international matches; it hosted its first international Twenty20 series in 2010, featuring New Zealand and Sri Lanka.
In September 2019, the stadium hosted the United States’ first-ever One Day International (ODI) series, which included the United States’ first ODI victory.
The Grand Prairie Stadium in Texas will also again hold a chunk of group games in addition to the knockout stages and final on 13 July.
The Grand Prairie venue was once the home of the minor league baseball team Texas Air Hogs and opened in the spring of 2023 with a capacity of 7,200.
The cricket-specific stadium features 1,000 club and premium seats, with the ability to expand capacity to 15,000 for major events.
Grand Prairie was a featured venue in the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup in 2024, which was staged in the United States and Caribbean.
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