England ready for pink ball cricket
BIRMINGHAM: Before this week, Stuart Broad only had one experience of bowling with a pink cricket ball --- and that was sending down a delivery in a demonstration for a British TV channel in June.
On Thursday, the England paceman will be playing an international match with them, one of a raft of new challenges facing him and his teammates in their first-ever day-night Test.
“It’s stepping into the unknown completely,” Broad said ahead of the first of three Tests against the touring West Indies.
That unknown includes the pink ball, changing sleep patterns and different mealtimes with the subsequent impact on energy levels.
There’s a sense that England is treating the match at Edgbaston as a learning experience as much as a test. It’s unusual for a top international sports team to feel so underprepared for a game. “We’re going to have to be so adaptable and figure out what’s going on,” Broad said. “The exciting thing is we are going in with a clear mind and learning on the job, almost.”
This will be the fifth day-night Test match, with Australia involved in three of them, first against New Zealand in 2015 and then against South Africa and Pakistan, before Pakistan beat West Indies in October 2016.
The ICC introduced the option of countries playing day-night Tests in a bid to “enhance public appeal of cricket’s oldest format” and so that Test cricket “remains relevant in modern age.”
England will be using a pink Dukes ball, rather than the Kookaburra used in Australia.