Summer Sports - Cricket
Middlesex’s marquee approach to pre-season
ESSEX started a trend in 2012 by erecting a steel- framed structure on their square at Chelmsford and practising ‘outdoors’ on grass pre-season. By happy coincidence, the weather in 2012 was blazing hot. This year, with players facing snow and wind chill temperature of -2O
C, Essex have
been joined in the experiment by other counties such as Middlesex, Kent, Worcestershire and Glamorgan.
Keith inspects the side sheets to find the reason for the leaks
Angus Fraser (right), the Middlesex director of cricket, said he was thinking about ways of conducting covered outdoor practice last year. “Lo and behold they did it at Essex,” he said. “We went over there to have a look and it seemed to work.”
Middlesex’s marquee at Radlett Cricket Club, their training facility, has proved to be a learning process for Fraser, the head groundsman, Nick Searle, and his New Zealander assistant, Regan Sinclair.
Angus said: “We’ve obviously made an investment at Radlett and want to base ourselves here. Nick, the groundsman, is as keen as mustard to help, so we said we’d go ahead with it. In a sense it has been a challenge because you learn as you go along.”
Standing inside the marquee - Kent call it their “greenhouse” at Canterbury - there is constant noise as the wind rattles ropes and material against the metal framework, but the light is surprisingly
clear.The struts throw shadows across the mown strips, but the batsmen hardly noticed.
The Radlett marquee was erected in early February to ensure the soil had dried by the time net practice started a month later. The use of four hired industrial heaters helped the process after the heavy winter rain, and the players were glad to have one heater on duty during practice to keep them tolerably warm.
The surface played true and easy-paced and not dissimilar to an early season Championship pitch, though sounds were deadened and deliveries from fast bowlers occasionally proved hard for the eye to judge in overcast conditions.
“There are two reasons for doing it,” Angus said. “One is financial. If you send a group of twenty- five people to South Africa for a week or ten days, it costs you the thick end of £45,000. This net here is probably going to cost us in the region of £12,000 to £15,000. And also, I question whether training in Dubai or Barbados, places like that, on dead, shirt-front pitches in 40-degree heat prepares you for the sort of conditions we’re training in today, when it’s quite cold and soft underfoot and the ball is nipping around. It’s a completely different sensation of bat on ball.”
“So there’s a cricketing and a financial aspect. I think this is going to be the way forward. If we don’t go on a pre-season tour and we use this, we can almost afford another player on the staff.”
96 PC APRIL/MAY 2013
weather, and, when I did, I found that pitch 20 was absolutely sodden. Water had leaked onto not only pitch 20, but 19, 18, 17, 16 were all sodden as well. Without further ado, the blotter was employed to remove the standing surface water, the grass was brushed up and the hover was placed back into position with the heater at one end, and the hover’s integral circulation fans running just above tick over to push the warm air out of the vents at the other end. With the forecast predicting fine but dull and cloudy days on Saturday and Sunday, plus the amount of water that had soaked into the surface, it was going to be impossible to get any of the pitches dried out for Monday’s one day game against Worcestershire. So, phone calls were made and a new schedule was drawn up. Gloucestershire’s three day match was originally due to start on the Tuesday after the Worcestershire one-dayer, but was reduced to a two day match starting on Wednesday, with Worcestershire playing their one day game on Friday 29th.
That at least gave us four days to get a pitch dry. The forecast was still poor, with cloudy days and frost at night. So the heating, blowing, rolling process continued.
Stepping up the length of time the heater was deployed as the pitch dried was a trial in itself, but it was
obvious, by Tuesday afternoon, that the combination of all the practices put into action had worked, and the pitch would be fit for play to begin at 11.00am on the Wednesday morning. To obtain such a result was fantastic, but we are not talking an 8.00am to 4.00pm kind of day! Heaters and engines were not left running all night, with only the LED lights and the small electric circulation fans contained within the hover cover left on after 9.00pm at night. Was it all worth it? Ask
Worcestershire CCC; they had had all their other three friendly matches cancelled due to the poor weather conditions and, yes, a process has been devised whereby a pitch can be dried in inclement conditions within a short time frame.
Who would have believed that in eight days of a biting east winds, with just a bit of sunshine through daylight hours and frosts at nights, that the irrigation system would have been needed? Yet, it was put on twice in the three days before the start a three day game against Cardiff MCCU which began on 5th April. We’ve also been watering the
square, not just for new pitch preparation but for general maintenance, such has been the massive evapotranspiration caused by the incessant east wind and night- time frosts.
A process has been devised to dry a pitch in inclement weather
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