100 days to first ball: Inside LAKR's race to build Los Angeles' Olympic cricket home

Around 1pm on July 1, five hours before Los Angeles Knight Riders' new home in Pomona was to host its first Major League Cricket game, Mayank Dayal, Business Head of LA Knight Riders, found a quiet corner near square leg and allowed himself a moment. Dayal's moist eyes had a story to tell.

In front of him lay the final product: stumps planted around an immaculately marked crease, perimeter signage wrapped around the playing area, stands ready to receive spectators, broadcast machinery in place, LED boards and sightscreens completing the look of a venue that had, at last, become match ready. As he gazed at the ground, several memories collided at once. The calmness he was surrounded by stood in sharp contrast to the storms that had preceded it. A hundred-day race against time for the Knight Riders franchise to host their first home game on July 1.

For Dayal, the sight spoke not only of relief, but of the sleepless nights that had come before it. Of transforming a site that had spent decades as a horse racing venue before lying largely dormant into an international cricket ground in barely 100 days. Of hazmat-suit-clad crews on site after lead and asbestos concerns surfaced. Of buried sewage lines and a live 15,000-volt electrical transponder that revealed themselves only after the digging began, each forcing a fresh workaround in a build already racing the clock. Of a 12-and-a-half-foot wall from the old equestrian track, still buried beneath the surface, forcing crews to break through another remnant of the site's previous life before the field could be levelled. Of moving nearly 35,000 metric tons of earth to level a site where one end stood eight-and-a-half feet higher than the other. Of a floodlight pole that had to be moved 20 feet barely two weeks before the opener, triggering fresh drawings, city approvals and aviation clearances from the US Air Force.

For years, American cricket has been littered with stadium plans, facility proposals and ambitious build-outs that either stalled, or were quashed without a quiver. In a country where land is expensive, regulations vary from city to city, and residents can raise concerns over traffic, parking, noise, lighting and the environment, building a cricket ground is not merely a construction exercise. It is a negotiation with every stakeholder that surrounds the land.

In Pomona, that meant finding a deal that worked for LAKR, Fairplex and the city of Pomona itself. The Fairplex being a not-for-profit entity that operates the LA County Fair and leases the 500-acre fairgrounds from the city brought with itself its own set of challenges. LAKR's 60-acre parcel sat within that ecosystem, landlocked inside a larger property.

That process began long before Dayal, who was cherrypicked to lead the Knight Riders initiative in LA moved as marketing head of Gujarat Titans to LA. Dayal is quick to point out that the identification of the site was itself the product of years of work by Venky Mysore, and the Knight Riders franchise. Getting to Fairplex, however, was its own long chase.

Before Pomona emerged as the answer, the Knight Riders had spent years searching for the right fit. In a country where every local government has its own priorities, regulations and development objectives, finding a site is only half the challenge. Finding a location where the interests of the franchise, the landowner and the local authorities align is something else altogether.

"I know that there were many false starts, and we had to kiss many frogs before we got the princess," Dayal says.

That the princess eventually turned out to be Fairplex was not accidental. The site was scalable. It had freeway access, mountain views, and a hotel within walking distance, and the kind of open expanse rare in the Los Angeles sporting market. But it also had history.

The Fairplex site had once been an active World War II location, with the US Army having a presence there. After that came livestock exhibitions, animal trading, the LA County Fair and horse racing. Later, the old horse racing track was partly broken up with the idea of creating soccer fields, though that plan never truly took off. By the time LAKR entered the picture, the site was a blend of wild grass, gravel, uneven earth, old barns and stables and land that had not been levelled for the demands of professional cricket.

Once Fairplex became the chosen site, the next challenge was to assemble the machinery around it. This was not a project that could be pushed through by LAKR alone. It needed the confidence of the Fairplex administration, the cooperation of the city and county, and the responsiveness of a whole chain of clearance authorities. In that ecosystem, one of the most important figures turned out to be Walter Marquez, the CEO of Fairplex, a man with considerable goodwill in the circles this project would eventually touch.

Mayank Dayal (left) and Venky Mysore (third from left) with other stakeholders

Somewhere along the journey of building a cricket stadium, Dayal quietly turned Marquez into a genuine fan of the sport. Two days before Dayal spoke about the project to Cricbuzz, the Fairplex CEO wanted to discuss the recently concluded England-New Zealand Test. A cricket bat and batting gloves now occupy a corner of his office. It may well be one of Dayal's most understated achievements, because in a project that demanded cooperation at every turn, having one of its most influential local stakeholders championing cricket was no small asset.

Those relationships would soon be tested. One of the first major hurdles emerged from beneath the ground itself. Soon after excavation began, crews uncovered a live 15,000-volt electrical transponder sitting directly in the path of the build. It powered a significant part of the Fairplex premises and could neither be switched off nor simply worked around. The timing made matters even more precarious. The project was unfolding during Fairplex's busiest period of the year, when the annual LA County Fair draws nearly 800,000 visitors over just 14 days, leaving little room for disruption to the venue's core operations.

The initial estimate to relocate the transponder stretched to eight-and-a-half months, a timeline that would almost certainly have ruled out Los Angeles hosting MLC this season. Instead, it was moved in three days.

The reprieve, however, was short-lived. Barely 15 days before the opening game, another surprise surfaced. An old sewage line was discovered directly beneath the planned location of one of the permanent floodlight towers on the north side of the venue, forcing the pole to be shifted 20 feet. That single change triggered a domino effect. Because the stadium sits less than three miles from Brackett Field airport, the revised location required fresh engineering drawings, city approvals and FAA clearances before work could resume.

The sewage line discovered at the site

Ordinarily, Dayal estimates, the entire exercise would have taken close to three months. Instead, the approvals arrived just in time. Four of the six floodlight towers were powered for the first time two nights before the opener. The remaining two followed the next evening. By the time the players walked out on July 1, the stadium had been fully illuminated for barely a matter of hours.

For all the sleepless nights over utilities, permits and floodlights, the greatest leap of faith lay in the 22 yards at the centre of it all. The square had been laid only on March 22, less than four months before the first ball was bowled on July 1. Preparing an international quality cricket pitch in such a compressed timeframe bordered on the improbable, a challenge that fell on veteran curator Damian Hough, whose career includes long stints at Adelaide Oval.

"Never again should we do this," Hough remarked with a laugh. Against the odds, it worked. The seven MLC matches in Pomona produced an average first-innings score of around 160. For a square barely four months old, it was an encouraging first audition. Cricket squares mature with time, and conventional wisdom among curators is that they truly come into their own after living through a couple of monsoons.

Asked for the toughest day of the project, Dayal did not reach back into the past. "The toughest day is yet to come," he says.

That is because the Knight Riders have always viewed Pomona as a three-phase project. The temporary infrastructure that hosted MLC this summer is expected to gradually give way to a permanent, state-of-the-art 15,000-seat cricket stadium in time for the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028.

The first phase was about building an ICC-standard and Olympic-compliant field of play capable of staging elite cricket. It included temporary seating for approximately 5,000 spectators, hospitality areas, player and broadcast facilities, international-standard floodlighting, sightscreens and scoreboards.

The second phase, expected ahead of the 2027 season, will begin the transition from a temporary match venue into a more permanent cricket destination, with expanded spectator amenities, operational facilities and broadcast infrastructure. The final phase is the vision that first brought the Knight Riders to Los Angeles: a permanent, world-class cricket stadium with a capacity of around 15,000.

Yet no matter how grand that final version becomes, the first chapter is unlikely to be forgotten. In the years ahead, spectators will remember the San Gabriel Mountains, the California sunsets and, perhaps, the Olympic rings that will eventually adorn the venue. Few will ever know about the 100 day storm that Dayal and the Knight Riders franchise weathered before the first ball was bowled.