Borderman's Campaign Against Gratuitous Floodlit Cricket

Next Friday’s final round of T20 group games all begin with a welcome conformity at 5.30 pm. That means that every game will end well before 8.30 pm in natural daylight and floodlights will not come into the equation.

Hurrah!

Sussex has a pioneering place in the history of English floodlit cricket as the first county to install them back in 1999. But can we stop for a moment and ask why we need to be playing cricket at 10 o’clock at night - especially now the T20 tournament  starts in the shivering nights of mid-May ?
 
I confess I have never been a fan of floodlit cricket. But the question has been made more pertinent by last night’s televised game when Kent suffered a bizarre kind of floodlight ‘failure’, when the county decided to turn off the lights due to high winds which allegedly threatened to cause an ‘elf 'n' safety’ issue that could only be resolved by lowering the pylons and plunging the ground into darkness. By 9.30 when the game was called off, it still hadn't rained;  with exquisite irony as a couple of million pounds worth of telescopic floodlights were dimmed and lowered, the game was officially abandoned due to "bad light".

At the time, Somerset were behind on the D/L , but were potentially catching up fast, having just smashed 16 from a Claydon over and 15 from one from Harmison.

It was the second time in the last three visits by Sky cameras  to Canterbury that viewers have been robbed of a game:towards the end of last season a televised  40 overs game v Warwicks was abandoned because one of the floodlights pylons blew up.

And these kind iof problems  have plagued English floodlit cricket ever since it was introduced.   Take this article from Cricinfo in 2009 which reported:

“Kent have opted against staging floodlit cricket at Canterbury next summer. The county have taken the decision following problems in the last two years caused by strong winds preventing temporary lights being used at the St Lawrence Ground.

The NatWest Pro40 Division 2 game against Surrey in August was reduced to 27 overs-a-side after the lights had to be lowered when the wind speed increased. A year earlier, the game against Leicestershire was abandoned, when the lights were unable to be used because of the strong winds.
Kent’s director of business development Jamie Clifford said: "We have taken the decision because we don’t want to short-change the public again. Two years running they haven’t got what they wanted, so we have given ourselves some breathing space, and time to reflect on it. The new development will include permanent floodlights, which is a very exciting prospect."

Yet the installation of permanent lights has not improved matters, as was promised and just as many games are still being lost due to the technical and logistical problems of artificial lighting. I don’t know if Kent’s lights are particularly cheap or shoddy, but the Kent cricket-watching public is still being “short-changed” by a chronic inability to guarantee reliable artifical lighting outisde normal daylight hours.

Kent admittedly seem to have a bigger problem than most;  but they are certainly not the only ones. Sussex supporters will remember when the boot was on the other foot and Kent were incandescent with rage when a T20 game at Hove in 2009 was abandoned due to floodlight failure when they were on 66 without loss from 11 overs  chasing a modest 131, and D/L bizarrely awarded the game to Sussex.

It's instructive that two of  Sussex’s biggest T20 crowds this season were on a Sunday – v Sri Lanka at Hove and v Somerset at Arundel. That seems a compelling case for playing T20 on Sunday afternoons to me. But if we must have T20 on Friday nights, let all matches start at 5.30, as they regularly do at Durham, Glos, Leics, Somerset, Worcs and Yorks – and as they all will next Friday as the group stage reaches its climax.