Pink ball for pink Test? Rain-soaked SCG considers day-night match in future
SCG Trust chairman Tony Shepherd is adamant the Sydney Test must be played in its New Years time-slot despite weather concerns but would be open to re-imagining it as a day-night match to combat bad light stoppages.
Six of the last seven SCG Tests have been interrupted by rain and showers have affected the first four days of the current Test against South Africa with no play at all on Friday. That has prompted renewed calls to shift the SCG Test to a time-slot less likely to be affected by rain.
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Last summer, Shane Warne suggested Sydney could switch Tests with Brisbane so as to host the first match of the season in early December.
But Shepherd said the SCG would not surrender its New Years timeslot, despite conceding the La Nina weather pattern of the past two years had brought the ground’s bad run of weather into sharper focus.
“This is the tradition. We’ve just got to live with the climate,” he said on SEN on Saturday. “We do get a bit of rain here and sometimes it does disrupt play but we’ve just got to get through that.
“It’ll be a good season next year because I think we’re going to get El Nino (weather pattern) next year, which will mean we’ll be in the middle of a drought.”
After bad light forced two stoppages in play on day one against South Africa, Shepherd met with Cricket Australia CEO Nick Hockley.
While Hockley previously said he was hopeful updates to the SCG’s floodlights would prevent similar delays in future, Shepherd suggested Sydney could follow Adelaide’s lead and host a day-night Test with a pink ball.
The pink ball’s brighter colour makes it more visible than the traditional red ball and allows play to continue into darkness under lights.
“We could do a day-nighter or we could just use a pink ball the whole game,” Shepherd said. “The alternative would be if you had that sort of light issue towards the end of the day, just have a bag of pink balls there and substitute them.”
At stumps on day one, Australian batter Marnus Labuschagne pushed back against the idea of substituting the red ball out for a pink one as the balls do not react in the same way when bowled.
But Shepherd said the fans needed to be considered.
“In my view, cricket and all elite sports survive on fans,” he said. “The show must go on. We should do everything in our power to make sure we don’t have that (stoppages) happen again.”