Flabbergasting it is. The game of cricket is nearly four centuries old, however, a whole cricket game can succumb in moments to something as trivial as rainfall. While rain is not a pet peeve for a lot of games, cricket has to remain at the mercy of dark ominous clouds, directly or indirectly. Be it a World Cup final or a bilateral series decider, the falling of a few drops of rain can change its course. In worse conditions, rain can do the whole fixture in since, unlike the majority of other sports, closed-roof cricket stadiums have not been brought to fruition yet.
Why is rain so hated by the cricketfolk?
What can be the possible solution for this problem – surrendering to which, with the technology we are equipped with in this age and time, seems utterly absurd? To delve into the solution, we need to understand why is rain a party-crasher for cricket games.
Cricket, undoubtedly, is a sport full of subtleties. It’s more than a mere game of bat and ball. From moisture, grass, and the presence of wind to sunlight, clay of pitch, and humidity – everything influences what happens on the 22-yard deck and beyond it.
Rain skews the cricketing conditions of the ground, thus favoring one side more than the other. To avoid this unfair advantage, cricket turf is protected from rainwater as much as possible. Even if protecting means to call off the game as a whole.
Can we do something other than watching rain helplessly?
Now we will see what can be done about it. The first thing that comes into our minds is to construct a roof over every cricket stadium in the world, which can halt the rain’s progress to the ground.
However, this solution of constructing closed-roof cricket stadiums comes with its own pros and cons, and to our dismay, the cons outpace the pros.
The first problem is that cricket being an old game has grounds built decades and even centuries ago. For instance, the first time Lord’s Cricket Ground, known as the Home of Cricket, hosted a cricket match, Pakistan and India were a single country, the only satellite in space nearby was the moon, and no one had any idea that we could create a bomb by splitting atoms.
Building roofs on top of all the grounds across the World is a huge task. Certainly, this will inevitably place demands on both our time and financial resources. Even can disturb the cricketing cycle. In the context of financial resources, cricket has yet to reach the point where it can make a killing like other sports to afford such luxuries.
Moreover, a batter’s love for hitting ginormous sixes knows no bounds. A Shahid Afridi-esque player can hit sky-kissing sixes for fun. Keeping this in sight, the roofs will do more harm than good to the game. For example, there has been a lot of debate about the rewards for hitting the roof of the stadium, following a few incidents of this unusual occurrence. This may incur irreparable damage to the art of batting and lead to changes in a lot of rules as we know them.
Are time and financial restraints the only hurdles in the path of making this sport rain-proof?
For the sake of debate, let’s assume that we somehow end up capping all the stadiums with a roof that can protect them from rain. The closed-roof cricket stadiums remain as they are throughout the year. Naturally, the rain will not be the only thing that would be stopped from reaching the ground. Sunlight will be hindered too, thus damaging the grass. Besides, closed-roof cricket stadiums will deny the teams natural pitch conditions and lead to a sense of monotony across the countries. Lastly, the flow of wind will be blocked too, thereby taking away all the advantages bowlers typically derive from such atmospheric conditions. This is just a modicum of effects a closed roof will have on a cricket match.
But what if we build retractable closed-roof cricket stadiums?
It can be a good idea, but only to empty the ICC’s treasury. Protecting the ground from rain while ensuring the conditions remain as natural as possible, this again will not satisfy the centuries-old game.
The retractable or operable roof idea was applied down under in the Marvel Stadium, and as expected it did not pass with flying colors. One of its flaws is that it takes 8 minutes to open or close the roof, which is a sufficient amount of time for rain to play havoc with the pitch and create hideous-looking puddles in the ground.
All of this just points to one thing – if we want to dodge the rain’s curveballs, we’ve got to be smart about strategically planning the match location and scheduling them during time of the year rainfall is less likely to be a significant factor.
