Last weekend the Disney sports empire aired live cricket on one of its US cable networks for the first time. According to ESPN, 2.4m viewers watched the telecast of the ICC World Twenty20 final and 316,000 saw it through official online channels. Of course, that’s just 2% of the US audience for the Super Bowl. But this is ESPN we’re talking about, not an all-out revolution. As it has done since 2007, when it bought the online bible cricinfo.com, ESPN is betting shrewdly. The Indian TV audience for the World Twenty20, after all, was immense.

In most countries where cricket is popular – Britain, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, the Caribbean islands – it’s something between a niche pursuit and a national sport. In India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and even Afghanistan, it is an obsession. Through sheer economic weight, India has come to dominate the game. It now does so through the IPL, which ESPN will broadcast this year.

Cricket’s appeal to a US audience – or lack of appeal – can be endlessly, inexactly debated. America already has its slow, subtle and statistically minded bat-and-ball game. And so on. But Twenty20, the shortest form of the game, takes cricket’s greatest mystery to the American mind – that a game can take as long as five days and yet fail to produce a winner – completely out of the equation.