Can Americans Win at an International Cricket Tournament in Barbados?!

Here we are. We have arrived in Barbados. Brought to you by Mountain Dew, Baja Blast, and now it begins. Three days of training. Mission, win one game. A collection of goats. Robbie, can you get that on camera? One of them has a bird on their back. Oh my god, I didn't notice that. Incredible. You don't see that every day. Oh, lizard! Waking up feeling good. Yeah, going into the day, we feel good, man. Everybody's fired up. Vibes are high. Confidence is high. We're ready to go. It's nervously excited. This is the real thing now, so it's turned up to a new level. It's a lot of positivity without structure. Almost surface-level positivity, because no one really knows how to have deep positivity. They don't know the sport, and they never played a match before. So it's a lot of just, we got this. Let's go. There's like a sense of nervousness a little bit, but it's fine. Just pre-game jitters. There's nothing wrong with that. I feel good. Checking out the setup. The sixes are even closer than we thought. That should be our team's strength. We get game one, almost like it's happening too quick to have nerves. And we're just looking for excuses to jump in the ocean. If we win today, then we earned that right, and we can hop into the ocean, but not before. So I'm looking forward to that. Coach Joes was figuring out the positions and the rules. Who's our coach? No, he hasn't really told us much. Go big. Go big. Go hard. And that's it. And feel the rhythm. Feel the rhyme. It's jump. Hop right on. Is it hop right on? I sent it in the chat because I was watching Cool Runnings last night. Feel the rhythm. Feel the rhyme. Get on up. It's cricket time. Again, it's still what is the competition. If we're facing dudes, it could be tough for us. Digicel team walks past us, and they are not as friendly as I thought they were going to be. Kind of sizing us up. I tried to joke with them a little bit, and they weren't really about that. It was a head tilt. We weren't sure who was going to show up. We're in it. Like, it got real. Yeah, we were checking out the bowlers, you know. This tournament's really going to come down to how we stack up against their bowlers, you know, and what can we do with them. So we were just sizing them up, seeing what we had. A lot of our pregame reps have led to the batting order. We got fielders, Ryan, Norp. We know we want them to be active. Zo likes playing keeper, so he's going to be behind the stumps. We have our opening batsman and our opening pair of bowlers. Same two people, apparently. Cole and Jake. That's where it landed. So Jake's on strike. You and Cole. Front foot towards the ball and smash it. Lit it up. Be aggressive. I like to hit lead off in baseball. That nervous energy's not really there for me. I'm ready to hit that first ball of the game into the water. Set the tone. We're amazing. I mean, he's a pro's pro. He's been through big games. He's played games at the highest level in baseball, and I'm sure this is a nice little cakewalk for him, you know. At least he gives off that energy. We lose the coin toss. Joe's said he was going to win the coin toss. What happened? We're batting? You win the cost? No, but they're choosing a bowl first. So we won. You have to tell them we would have chose this. That's the strategy. No captain ever admits that they're doing what they don't want to do. Oh, okay. Joe's loses the coin toss. Doesn't matter. They've chosen to send us in, which means we're going to bat first. That's exactly what we wanted. We wanted to put up a big score. I think the mistake for the team, the other team, was choosing to bowl first, and we ended up getting exactly what we wanted. We wanted to hit first because we bang, baby. We bang sixes, and that's what we're here to do. First ball. Kind of a little tense. What's going to happen? A little hush. I kind of blacked out, honestly, but I just saw it coming kind of into me, and I know the ocean was over to my right, so I just kind of kept turning. And forget about baseball. These guys are cricketers. It flew. It was nice. Once Cole hit that six, like, energy came up over the team. That's like, we needed that so bad. We can play here. You know, we can play here. Love that. That six meant everything. Into the ocean we go. Yes, we do. So when I come up, Cole has hit, which that's, I'd say, the key to unlocking our team is Cole. And then it was kind of like, let's run into something here. Then we did. Watching Jake and Cole go back and forth and put up a ton of runs, it was definitely cool, and, like, energy was high. I remember sitting on the bench, like, going nuts the whole entire time. Sitting on the bench watching those guys. I can do that all tournament long if I hit like that. Yeah, it was awesome. I'll always have that vision imprinted in my mind. The boys were going crazy. The boys and the girls were going crazy back there. 18 in the first over? Yeah, 18 in the first over, guys. We were keyholing them a little bit. We were being patient. And especially with how small the pitch is, the six is everything. We're trying to launch, especially us early hitters. So we were being patient and trying to follow the rules as best as Jimmy and Joe's and Liam and those guys taught us. It was funny because, I mean, they didn't know us from anybody, and no one out there knows that I'm a baseball player, really. They're finding out as we're playing. I think everybody was surprised, like, whoa, these Americans playing cricket, and you know what? Hitting translates. Chat's going crazy, and we love all that. But at the same time, too, like, this was the first time we've ever played an actual cricket game, and I didn't really know how many runs were enough runs. I was like, is this team going to do the same thing to us that Cole and Jake just did to them? Especially the power play. Like, the power play's huge. Is that the end of that over? It's 36 total. Are we doing good? Yes. We're going to call power play after this. Joe's, you're going to step up. You got to get everyone's attention. I mean, if you have to this ball. All right. Biggest win is Coach Joe's choosing the power play in the third over, identifying which bowler to attack, identifying the moment. All right, go get him. Go get him. Okay. I thought about it. I looked at it. We're going to go ahead and take our power play with this guy. Yeah, go get him. Tell him. Tell Jake to call it. Jake, power play. Power play. Joe's has to get out of his seat. He's walking onto the sand. He's making a commotion. Hey, hey, listen to me. Listen to me. I'm the coach. Everyone's ignoring him. We're going to do our power play. Tell him power play. Way to go, Coach Joe's. Way to go, Coach Joe's. Finally gets through power play. They switch to the pink ball. The pink ball is nice, and you see it. It looks like a fruit flying at you. Oh, no, that's gone. That's way gone. Wow, 12 up into the breeze. Six from Kotuck. Double runs, boom, 12 runs. Next ball, they run two runs, and then Jake, six, six, six, but it's the pink ball power play, 12, 12, 12. Double points. Those that know know. What is that, Metal Gear Solid? Call of Duty. Yeah, those are double. Six, six, six, six, six, six, six. We probably had the best over that you could ask for in power play. Everything is great. There's nothing. This is literally the perfect game, what we wanted. There was two balls today. I may have hit further than anything outside of golf in my life. If you bring in the baseball days, I got in a couple to left center that I got. That's the farthest I've seen Jake hit a ball. I didn't know how much we're supposed to celebrate, because again, celebrating in a lot of our sports, the other team gets offended by that. We don't want to do that. If you look back at the clips of me and Cole, it's a lot of subtle, very gentle. We're happy with what we did, but we don't want to offend everyone. That last ball was the most expensive over I have ever seen in the history of cricket. We started feeling good once the ball started flying. It started to be kind of obvious that we were doing well, but we weren't out of the woods yet. Get in there, Shelf. All right, let's give Jake a little greeting here. Hit the ball, hit the ball. That was phenomenal. Atta boy. My biggest thing coming into this when I told I wasn't going to be a part of the first pair is just watch, pay attention to all the bowlers, which way is it spinning. So when Cole and Jake, great inning by the way, but as soon as they come out, I'm ready to come in and pick it right back up where we left off. Bang, we get a six and we're just ball keeps rolling. No hesitation, no deflect one and see it. Bang and go. If we get to 100, I'm confident. If we blow past 100, I'm incredibly confident. I don't think it's losable at this point. We got to 120 something runs. I don't think we can lose this game. I'm telling the guys on the bench, all we need to do is be loud and keep the energy on our side. Maybe an early wicket and the math starts becoming, it just starts going to crumble them. The other thing we saw this when we played our indoor cricket match, we thought we held them to a decent number and then we found out we did not. So when we put up a big number, we thought we did great, but we still didn't know what if they put up a crazy number? I think that part of the crew was really surprised that we came up and we put up that savage number. I'm going to call it a savage number because it really was. And it wasn't disrespectful, but it was savage. And we love that. Maybe there's some audio of it, but the, uh, the referee, I believe that's what we call them in this sport umpire. I got two warmups and he was just like, Hey man, put it in the green. We're just going straight. We're just on the green. Basically like, as long as you guys don't bring wides into this, you're going to win handily. Jake's first ball goes for six and it's like, okay, if every ball goes for six, that's not good. I believe the next one went for four or it went for two and I threw it around like an idiot. At one point I picked the ball up and I just threw it like a blind person. Back up the throw! Back up the throw! I got excited. They call their power play on Kotuck, which is great. I feel like it's, uh, it's just all right. It's not my strongest suit probably, but I'm confident that I can throw strikes. **** yeah. He wraps up, Norp comes in. Jimmy continues to surprise me just with his athletic prowess. You find a game for Jimmy, he finds a way to step up and succeed. He's an athlete beyond his years. Game one, as you know, this generation says, game one was cinema. Everyone had it. Jimmy Norp, he has found something, like he's throwing an actual like nice ball that a couple of the cricket guys came up and I think they were like, good action on that. Desperation hits, they try to do something they shouldn't. He tries to go for a reverse, so he steps across and by doing that, gives Norp the stumps. The big wicket, that's something nobody could ever take away from me, but it's cool. Like it sounds funny. We're out here playing cricket, right? Like never thought I'd be here in a million years, but that's a moment I genuinely will remember for the rest of my life. So now we're going into the next over feeling even better. I'm super happy about the celebration. We were worried about it. Shout out to Jimmy Norp who's been working really hard on the ball and it's looking really good. Good action on his, uh, on his ball. I get the ball myself. As long as I put it straight, we're going to do well. Once we had like two overs left, I was like, okay, we got it. Like, you can just feel it in the air. We had it. So who's going to collect the mic so we can jump in the water? Second ball, I throw more full. Guy tries to smack it, tips it. Zo makes the catch. Zo, right under it, camped under it, super confident, right in the basket, baby. I don't do that usually. Jimmy, you got to work on that. We did not have Cohen in the plans to pitch, but we're up by so much. Let's let everyone get a look. It's just like, it's like if you're in the world series and you're up 15 runs and there's two outs and you know it's about to happen, right? That's how I felt out there. I was like, we came here to win one game and we're about to do it. And then we do it. It was so sick. It felt like we, uh, we clinched a playoff berth, honestly. It felt great to win. Why don't, like, that is so infectious. To be able to win just feels like Saturday morning as a little kid, you wake up, you eat a bowl of cereal, you watch some cartoons. You don't have no care in the world. You don't have to worry about anything. That's what it felt like. And everybody gets in the ocean. Cole Pucker gets in the ocean. That guy's afraid of sharks. So getting him in there was big for the team. Coach Joe's is going nuts. He's showing more energy than we expected to see. So jumping into that saltwater, I never thought saltwater could taste sweet. And it did. I mean, the running in the water, no other team did that. It's hot. It's, it's hot. And we won getting in the drink there. There was no, no hessy. The celly was like sort of planned and we talked about it during the game. And then once we realized, wait, we're going to win this. Vibes are high. You might be thinking, well, of course you won. You're not playing a professional competition against professionals. Well, we're not professionals. They've played cricket before in their lives. We have not. I think it was the perfect way to kick off the tournament. A little bias there. And the celebration was gentle, but American. Like that's a nice moment with the boys forever. We should not, we should not have won because we've never played cricket before. To come down here and make all this trip and, uh, you know, have all this merch. It's a, it's a lot to take on. And we came down here and we, uh, we fulfilled our goal. We won one game in Barbados. We came here and we got exactly what we wanted to do to prove that some Americans on this reverse cool running journey now playing cricket can be able to go into another country where they play cricket and beat them there. And we did, we did, we won one game. I think they get medals. Medals? I want a medal. This could mean anything, you know, Adam, who's, I think he's like in charge of the cricket impact group. You know, he said I was the man of the match. So I don't know. I don't know how you'd measure that. So what happened in the other games? We played more games. Keep your head up, man. There's winning and learning. This is a tough start. Good game. Good game. We keep learning. Could be worse. Could have lost and not have been in Barbados. This wasn't about the other games though. This was about win one game and that's exactly what we did. Thank you to Mountain Dew, Baja Blast. It has been a blast and we won one game. Thank you to all of you for watching and we appreciate it and we'll see you later. But first, check out our fifth game.