The painstaking method of preparing drop-in pitches

The cricket administrators in India are a lucky lot for the kind of patronage the game receives in the country. The huge backing for cricket not only has armed the Board of Control for Cricket in India with unbridled power but has kept them immune from other disciplines posing any competition and eating into their share of pie.

Not all cricket boards, however, enjoy the financial security that the BCCI does. Save the sub-continental nations, the game isn’t the number one sport in other major cricket-playing countries. Soccer rules the roost in England, Australian rules football (AFL) draws the biggest crowds in Australia and rugby is way ahead of cricket in both South Africa and New Zealand.

While cricket infrastructure in terms of new stadia and academies is booming in India, some of the iconic grounds in Australia and New Zealand have long decided to share the premises with more popular sports in their respective countries. This, in a way, also ensures cost effectiveness. And to that effect, some of these venues began using drop-in pitches to minimise or eliminate the muddy area in the centre for football and rugby which are played in the winter. Melbourne and Adelaide have gone for drop-in surfaces in Australia while Auckland and Wellington followed suit in New Zealand.

The word drop-in is self-explanatory wherein a pitch is prepared outside the ground and literally dropped in in the square dug up at the centre of the field. There have been complaints that these portable pitches don’t exactly behave in the manner a traditional deck would do but Blair Christiansen, the Turf Manager at the Eden Park in Auckland, doesn’t quite agree with the view. 

“They are similar in terms of the soil types that we use, the depth of the soil is the same, it’s the same grass type,” points out Christiansen, who had been commissioned by the Karnataka State Cricket Association in developing pitches and grounds across the State in 2007. “So with respect to the profile and everything else they are the same. But they do behave a little bit differently to say a normal, traditional cricket pitch. So we need to manage certain aspects of their preparation a little bit differently. Early on they were being treated the same (as the traditional wickets). We learnt our lessons. Last year we had a Test match against India that was a pretty good match.

“Previously we had one against England, which went down to the last over. Here, we're trying to develop a characteristic of them having something in them for the bowlers. The trait we'd like to develop is the pace and bounce on them. All the cricketers can enjoy that type of surface,” he explains.

While having portable surfaces makes it a durable business model, the logistics involved in preparing and transporting them are mind-boggling. Just consider these facts – each steel tray (portable pitches) is three metres wide, 25 metres long and weighs 20 tons. The transporter machine which lifts the tray and drops it in weighs 40 tons.    

“We have five cricket trays here,” says Christiansen. “We will know six months in advance which game is going to be on which tray. Over here at the Eden Park’s Outer Oval (second ground), we sow the grass probably six months prior to our cricket season which is from September-October and we manage those pitches to be in perfect condition…

 The World Cup has been on for about four weeks now and the preparation of these pitches has been ongoing for the past six months -- mowing, watering, rolling, fertilising, making sure that the turf cover is perfect, prefect uniformity of grass cover…”

Christiansen says that it takes about four and a half hours to transport the pitch from the Outer Oval, where it’s prepared, to the main Eden Park field. And the entire distance they will be covering during this time is no more than 300 metres!

“We use the transporter machine, which is a big crane, to move the pitches in and out,” Christiansen says. “We lift it up as one piece from the ground, drive it out and put it out in the hole. It takes about four and half hours to do the swap (taking back the other pitch). It’s really heavy and we drive very slowly because it’s 30 metres long. We stop all the traffic coming in and it takes about 20 minutes to get off the road and enter the main gate of the stadium. And you have to make sure the field is really in good condition because the machine weighs 40 tons, you have to ensure it can take that weight. It’s a delicate procedure and you sort of have to be mentally on to it,” he tells you. 

Once the cricket season is over they replace the drop-in pitch tray with that of a sand tray. “Its profile is not actually cricket soil or anything of that sort. It’s actually sand. It’s the same as the rest of the field and that’s where they play rugby and football. We will put that in after the World Cup and it will stay on until about October when cricket resumes again,” he signs off.