I was recently reading that america played in the first ever international game and that in the 1870s they had some of the finest players in the world. So I am wondering why did Cricket fail as a sport in the USA?
There are two factors that played a major role in the decline of cricket's popularity in the United States. The first reason is that in 1909 the International Cricket Council made it so that only commonwealth nations could compete in the Imperial Cricket Conference. By default, this banned the United States from competing in the sport at the highest level. The second reason would be the rise and eventual domination of baseball in America. Had the ICC not made the conference only available to commonwealth nations, perhaps cricket would still be popular in the US.
Sources:
Cricket's "failure" in the United States is that baseball had better marketing. Cricket is actually growing in popularity in certain areas in the United States due to certain immigrant populations growing as well.
Although cricket was spread throughout the British Empire before America gains independence, it became part of a purposeful diffusion in the second half of the 1800s(1). Therefore, the British were less focused on cricket's success in America.
Cricket also loses much of its popularity in Canada -- which, still being under British rule at the time, is a little more telling. In both the US and Canada, cricket ties itself to 'old money' which gives it bad PR in that it is seen as aristocratic -- subtext it does not have throughout the rest of the Empire. (2)
Paradoxically, baseball requires less room than cricket to be played (even though the US has much more open space than other imperial holdings) so it gains in popularity in the United States during the industrialization of the cities between 1901 and 1916 as people can play baseball in the inner cities. (3)
In addition to these three factors as to the loss of popularity of cricket, baseball in America grows exponentially as soldiers travel throughout the country playing the game during the Civil War. Early baseball proponents such as Albert Spalding worked very hard to increase the popularity of baseball, while there were no comparable figures in cricket at the time -- cricket was growing everywhere else under British control. Spalding, in fact, created a baseball world tour in the 1880s to help drum up interest internationally (and, unsurprisingly, help make sales for his new sporting goods business).
Jason Kaufman and Orlando Patterson, “Cross-National Cultural Diffusion: The Global Spread of Cricket,” American Sociological Review vol. 70, (2005): 86.
Richard Holt, Sport and the British: a Modern History, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989: 223-4.
David P. Sentance, Cricket in America, 1710-2000, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2006: 25.