Summer Sports - Cricket
Keith Exton, Head Groundsman at the SWALEC Stadium, explains the processes he used to get outdoor wickets ready for net practice during the second coldest March since records began
A marquee’d improvement!
F
or most cricket groundsmen the weather provides their biggest challenge. Last year’s drought conditions in the first three months were followed by torrential rain and flooding, which began in early April and continued throughout the summer. Such was the dedication of the County groundsmen, they collectively won the Cricket Writers Club annual Peter Smith Memorial Award award for their services to cricket, aka ‘getting the game on’! This year has been a complete contrast, and this group of hardy professionals have had to contend with, what officially became, the second coldest March on record, which saw snow, frost, rain and very little sunshine in the run up to the season.
The cold weather continued into early April, with one pre-season friendly at the Ageas Bowl between Hampshire and 94 PC APRIL/MAY 2013
Surrey being postponed due to snow! With these two extreme weather patterns in the past two years came a requirement to get outdoor practice wickets up and running in early March, so that the players could train on grass wickets rather than indoor nets. Perhaps a reasonable request given ‘normal’ weather, but the springs of 2012 and 2013 were anything but. Last year, Stuart Kerrison, Head
Groundsman at Essex CCC, trialed the use of a marquee over his net practice wickets so that the players could practice ‘outdoors’ safe from the vagaries of the weather. This proved to be a big success and, this year, several other clubs have gone down this route. However, even going to these great lengths to cover up the grass net areas, the groundsman still needs fairly decent weather, with air and ground
temperatures consistently above 6-8O C, to
get the desired results. One county groundsman, Keith Exton at Glamorgan’s SWALEC stadium, is perhaps in a better position than some of his counterparts when it comes to soil temperatures. As reported in this magazine, Keith has installed LED grow lights under his hover cover to help promote grass growth, and even attached a heater/blower to help dry out the soil profile in readiness for his first match on the 25th March when Glamorgan’s cricketers ‘enjoyed’ three days of action between themselves, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire for warm-up games. Keith was confident the use of a heater under the hover cover would work, having already trialed it in the marquee he was using on his practice net area. This had been erected on 8th February to allow him, what he hoped would be,
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