‘The Long Game: Saurabh Netravalkar, Between Two Worlds’ Review: An Education in Cricket

Mr. Netravalkar gets a lot of attention because—in addition to being a world-class bowler (pitcher)—he’s also a software engineer at Oracle in Silicon Valley. Professional American cricket was the brainchild of South Asian tech moguls (no pun intended) who wanted to bring the sport to the one former English colony where it has never quite flourished. “The U.S. only beat [cricket superpower] Pakistan because of the H-1B visa,” posted one online spoilsport, following Mr. Netravalkar’s virtually perfect game at the 2024 T20 World Cup in Dallas. This may be so. But as one panelist says—during a clip in which podcasting bro Andrew Schulz is trying to catalog the nationalities of the players in a Team USA photo—“They’re American, dude.”

“The Long Game,” available on Prime Video on June 18, has a foot in two worlds of documentary making. It’s an in-depth portrait of Mr. Netravalkar—including his successes in youth cricket back in Mumbai, his education at Cornell, his marriage and family, and his integration into Oracle. And it’s something of a primer on international cricket itself. Directed by Pierre Friquet, credited here as “PYARé” (“beloved” in Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi), the film has something of a split personality: If you know little about cricket, you’ll learn a lot, but may still find yourself overwhelmed by the up-close and personal details. If you’re a fan already, much of the storytelling will be redundant, though the insight into the subject and his psychology—illuminated through dramatic animated sequences featuring literal demons—may be quite welcome. If quite melodramatic.

Mr. Netravalkar is an engaging central figure and the pacing of the film is fairly brisk even though this viewer found the production values mixed. The sound seemed off, which will present a problem for some (like me) given the variety of accents and Indian-inflected English; subtitles throughout (there are some) would have helped, but so would better sound. This will be corrected by the time the film actually airs. Its executive producers include Adam Leipzig, who has a raft of Hollywood credits (“Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” “Dead Poets Society,” “Titus”) and was instrumental in the transformation of the French-made “March of the Penguins” of 2005 from a modest import into a global sensation.

“The Long Game” travels back and forth between California and India, revisiting Mr. Netravalkar’s early triumphs and providing a glimpse of how cricket is played by regular people in India, on the level of sandlot baseball, with dozens of games under way across what appears to be every available patch of park space in Mumbai. The mental state of its sports star/expatriate is a preoccupation of “The Long Game,” but the love of the game is paramount, whether the cricketer is facing off against the Pakistanis, or the Patel family down the street.

Mr. Anderson is the Journal’s TV critic.