The Blueprint For Day-Night Success

Tim Wigmore hails the impact of day-night cricket in Adelaide and asks whether it will be the norm in five years’ time

- Tim Wigmore

The Adelaide Oval,Australia’s finest cricket ground, may well never stage a day Test match ever again. If there is a sadness in this realisation, it also reflects how it has only taken the ground three years to make its day-night Test into an institution.

Everything about day-night cricket at Adelaide seems perfect, starting with the bridge from the city centre into town. Remarkably, this was deeply controversial, and caused deep angst among many local residents when it was built. Yet strolling over the pedestrian bridge before play begins is now wired into the very experience of attending a day-night Test at Adelaide. It sets the day up perfectly.

It is enough to ask why on earth day-night Test cricket took so long. But the sport has always been too conservative for its own good, fretting over the impact of statistics, and worrying that change will destroy all that is worthwhile about the game, rather than ensure its vibrancy for the next generation.

And so, even when the International Cricket Council approved day-night Tests back in 2012, boards were reticent to organise them because so much looked like it could go wrong – the lights, the ball, the weather, the crowd, the pitch and, more fundamentally, the very essence of Test cricket.