Counties in ‘leap of faith’ with first floodlit games
Matches will help England prepare for day-night Tests ECB admits it has a lot to learn from next week’s trial
County cricket will take a “leap of faith” this week with a round of floodlit championship matches designed to prepare England players for the first day-night Test in this country.
The counties will see that rare sight of an England Test player in their dressing room for this week’s matches which start tomorrow, with Joe Root back for Yorkshire and Ben Stokes for Durham.
The fixtures fall a few days after the longest day so the floodlights will be barely used but the county schedule is so tightly packed, with Twenty20 cricket played in a block for a month from the first week of July, that this round of matches was the only option ahead of the floodlit Test against the West Indies at Edgbaston in August.
A pink ball made by Duke, the company that manufactures red balls used in Test and county cricket in England, will be used after it was successfully trialled in the Champion County match in Abu Dhabi in March. That game was a low-scoring affair with the ball behaving differently in the twilight hour before the lights took over and proper darkness descended.
There is likely to be a much longer twilight this week, which poses a few tactical questions for the counties. When do they attack the pink ball, do they bowl spinners earlier and how do batsmen approach the twilight session? With the modern game dominated by the bat, this could be a good week to be a bowler. Stuart Broad de- scribed the seam on the pink Duke ball as “lovely” when he bowled with it for the Sky cameras last week and if there are cloudy evenings next week then games are unlikely to last the distance.
Matches start at 2pm with ‘lunch’ at 4pm and tea at 6.40pm with a cut off at 10pm. Counties are offering discounts after the first session to try to lure the after-work crowd who will have a rare chance to see some of the best players in England in domestic action. With floodlit Test cricket spreading around the world, England are playing a day-night Test in Adelaide this winter, there will be more rounds of county championship cricket played under the lights in the future.
It is not for every county. Kent declined the offer of a floodlit match believing their members would prefer more traditional championship cricket and Middlesex are not playing at Lord’s due to restrictions on using the lights. Instead they play at Chelmsford, where Mohammad Amir will make his debut for leaders Essex, a challenge for the Middlesex batsmen with a red ball, let alone the pink one.
Floodlit Test cricket started last year in Australia and was the culmination of years of work by the MCC, which has used its Champion County match since 2010 to test different pink balls. In Australia the Kookaburra is used but deteriorates quickly. This year the Duke ball was trialled and lasted longer. It is hand stitched with black twine and the leather is dyed pink, whereas on the Kookaburra a pink lacquer is added to an existing white ball. The pink Duke does not have as much grease added to it as the red one so will not polish as easily for the quick bowlers but early reports suggest it swings conventionally as it gets older.
“The floodlights are not all about playing under a dark sky, it is about being able to start later with an opportunity to bring in a crowd after work,” said Alan Fordham, the England and Wales Cricket Board’s operations manager in charge of scheduling. “There are unknowns about it and we are up front about that and it is a challenge to get a full round of matches in where the lights are available. We have a Test match in August, so if there are any problems we are going to learn from this.
“You have to take the leap of faith to find out what the answers are.”