Edgbaston does its homework before England’s first day-night Test
The first of many questions that executives at Edgbaston had to ask as they commenced preparations for England’s first ever day-night Test was: what do you call the breaks? Standard, daytime Tests have their lunch break at, well, lunchtime, and their tea break at, give or take, tea time. A 2pm start distorts the timetable and, while 4pm can be referred to in many ways, if you are calling it lunchtime something has gone badly wrong with your day.
In Adelaide, where Australia played day-night Test matches against New Zealand in 2015 and South Africa the following year, and where England will appear in another this December, the breaks were switched, with the first becoming shorter and known as tea, and the second – coming, as it does, at approximately dinnertime – stretching longer and renamed dinner.
“We decided in discussions with the ECB not to do that, because we think that would be more confusing,” says Neil Snowball, Warwickshire’s chief executive and veteran of both 2012 Olympic and 2015 Rugby World Cup organising committees. “We’ll be starting at 2pm, have the first two-hour session and our main interval will be the first interval, which we’ll call ‘lunch’, even though it’s at 4 o’clock, then we’ll have the second break between 6.40pm and 7pm which again we’ll call ‘tea’. It’s just to avoid confusion. We don’t know if this is going to be the first of many or whether it’s a one-off but we thought it was easier to explain.”
For all their experience of hosting floodlit matches, preparing for England’s first day-night Test has been nowhere near as straightforward as it might have been to put on five successive day-night ODIs. Snowball, as part of his preparations, has been in regular contact with Keith Bradshaw, the former chief executive of MCC who now holds the same position at the South Australian Cricket Association and has been involved in all the Adelaide matches. In March Snowball and Gary Barwell, Warwickshire’s head groundsman, were in Abu Dhabi to see the Champion County match played, as this week’s Test will be, with a pink Dukes ball.
“One of the things we learned out there was not to try to be too clever with the actual pitch,” says Snowball. “There have been various debates about whether you leave a bit more on, whether you take a bit more off, but what we’ve concluded is that we should just produce a good Edgbaston strip, a good Test pitch with good carry, nice and firm.”
They also returned from Abu Dhabi with a supply of adjuvant spray, regularly used in hotter climates to help disperse evening dew. “You’ve probably seen sometimes – we do it and they do it abroad – they whizz round on a tractor with a rope,” says Snowball. “So basically you put a very fine spray over the outfield which coats the blades of grass so that, if the dew does fall, it just sits on the top of the grass, so that when you whizz round with the rope it flicks it all up in the air and a percentage of it evaporates. So it doesn’t stop the dew forming, it just enables the dew to stick on the top of the grass and then it makes it easier for us to flick it off. Abroad they’re pretty confident the dew will form and when it’ll fall. Obviously it’s a bit unpredictable here, so we’re just doing it as a precaution.”
Among the lessons learned from Adelaide was the importance of illuminating not only the actual ground but also the practice areas and the car parks, both of which were unpopularly dark when they hosted their first day-nighter. Another change is that, if more play is required to make up time lost during the day, another hour will be split between its end, as is traditional, and the start of the following one. So ticket-holders on days two and beyond should be aware that, if they turn up at 2pm they may already have missed half an hour’s action, and that ideally they should check on Warwickshire’s website or on social media in case the start time has been brought forward.
But while fans have been warned not to be late, staff are being told not to be early. “If you have a full five days, like we did last year against Pakistan, it’s quite gruelling for everybody involved – whether it’s the chefs, the groundstaff or the security guys,” says Snowball. “And people are used to getting in very early on Test days, at 7.30 ready for an 11am start. One of the things we’ve had to tell people is: ‘Don’t come in at 7.30am. Because you’re not going to get to bed until about 2am, and you need to get some rest.’ A five-day Test means more pressure on the stadium, more pressure on the infrastructure and more pressure on the people. It’s about getting the staff to pace themselves, that’s probably the main thing we’ve been focusing on.”
A sighting of the pink ball has, meanwhile, given caterers the chance to go back to the fuchsia. “We’ll be getting into the spirit of the pink ball,” says Snowball. “We’ve got quite a bit of rosé, pink champagne, we’ve got some pink cocktails. We’ve created a beach area behind the Wyatt stand, partly because it’s the West Indies as well, so we’ve got a rum shack, a big screen, we’ve got deckchairs. People will see a bit of a pink theme about the place.”
Day two is officially a sell-out, with days one and three expected to join it before action gets under way – no mean feat when, in Snowball’s words, “West Indies these days are probably not as easy a sell as some of the other touring sides.”
But despite the commercial success, no imminent repeat is likely: television viewers in Pakistan and India, next summer’s tourists, are unlikely to welcome the delayed finish time, which would keep them up until somewhere between 1am and 3am. Though the timing is even worse for Australians, the 2019 Ashes will sell out easily enough anyway. Still, Snowball expects the experiment to be popular.
“What I found out in Abu Dhabi was each of the three sessions almost has its own unique identity,” he says. “The first session was fairly traditional, played in bright sunshine. Then you moved into that sort of twilight zone when different things happened: the ball did a little bit more; there was not a clatter of wickets but it was clearly hard work for the batsmen. Then you moved into the proper night-time, the third session, which was just really atmospheric, with the floodlights and the pink ball. At Edgbaston with a full crowd, I’m really looking forward to that.”
Warwickshire were the pioneers of floodlit cricket in England, hosting the first competitive match 20 years ago last month. “We were very proud of that fact and, when we were approached by the ECB, we thought it would be nice to have the double with the first ever floodlit Test match,” says Snowball. “We thought there was a good commercial angle, which has proved to be the case because tickets have sold very well. It is an experiment. We might get to the end of this and say, ‘Never again.’ Or we might say, ‘You know what, that was terrific.’ Either it’ll be the one and only or it’ll be the first of many. Either way it’s going to be a history Test. So it’s nice to be part of history.”
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2...ston-england-first-day-night-test-west-indies
