Adelaide: The Nassau County International Cricket Stadium in Eisenhower Park, New York, may see only one warm-up match happening before the Men’s T20 World Cup starts, said Damien Hough, the Adelaide Oval curator.
The International Cricket Council (ICC) has given the charge of development of the drop-in pitches for the venue, which is located 30 miles east of Manhattan, to Hough and his team at the Adelaide Oval Turf Solutions. “The first game is early June. There’s probably going to be a warm-up game just to test the venue out in late May.”
“But I pinch myself sometimes. For us, Adelaide Oval Turf Solutions, to have a little bit of involvement and assist with something that is quite historic in a World Cup in America for the first time,” said Hough in a chat with Channel 7.
He also went on to explain the process of pitch preparation, which involves a lot of logistics. “It’s a bit tricky, we basically built six of the 10 trays here in Adelaide. We made them modular. We’re really proud of them. We’ve got a couple out of the back that will probably come out here 9on Adelaide Oval) next year.”
“We put them in a shipping container and send them really wherever we want around the world. But they’ve gone over to Florida. I’ve just come back from a month of work over there putting the trays together, putting the soil in, compacting them and putting the grass on. So we’re in the grow-in phase.”
“We’ve got a business, a company over there called LandTek that are helping us with the grow-in phase. Then there’s a couple more strategic trips throughout the next six months to do some work on them and then transport them from Florida all the way up to New York where we’ll put them in and prepare them,” he added.
New York is scheduled to host eight matches of the tournament happening in the USA and West Indies, including three games of India. The highly-anticipated India-Pakistan clash, pencilled for June 9, will also be hosted at this venue.
“It’s a lot of work that’s gone into it so far. But the real work starts around the start of May. It’ll take two days to transport them up which is quite incredible. Never done that before. So, there’s a lot of firsts, then there’s getting them in the ground.”
“Four go into that venue, that pop-up stadium, 34,000-seat stadium. Eight games in 10 days. One of them is Pakistan and India which will be amazing. Then there’s six that go into the warm-up venue with so many teams rotating through and so much training,” he concluded.
–IANS