'Planet stopped play': Cricket tackles threat of climate change

Drought, rainfall and extreme heat put future of England's summer game in doubt

Grassroots cricket faces a challenge to adapt to the planet's rising temperatures. Getty

A full house at Lord’s, an Ashes Test in full cry – cricket bosses should be full of the joys of summer. Yet an intrusion on the first of five days' play was a reminder of an existential threat hanging over cricket.

The pitch invasion by Just Stop Oil protesters represented a momentary and unpleasant disruption for the players and watching fans, but in the longer term the game's leaders are worried that happy summer days at the cricket are under threat from climate change.

Behind closed doors at the Lord’s headquarters of English cricket, former players have been brainstorming how to stop the summer sport from becoming unsustainable.

Upheavals in the natural world such as extreme heat, drought, floods and deforestation all leave cricket with distinctive puzzles to solve.

Football and rugby can be played in wet weather, most matches are over in two hours and players generally pack up for the summer. Even tennis, another British summer fixture on grass, can continue under a roof.

Cricket is different. Players and umpires are in the sun for days at a time, often wearing helmets and pads during the hottest part of the year. Rain or flooding stops play and cloud cover directly affects the contest.

The sport is beloved on the hot, low-lying Indian subcontinent. Bat makers in Kashmir have found wood from willow trees increasingly hard to come by, as plantations in the Himalayan region are cut down and not replaced.

And while the wealthy members of the Marylebone Cricket Club, which owns Lord's, can always turn on the ground’s floodlights to play in the evening, the costs of climate change will be harder for grassroots cricket to bear.

“It means my job changes from being a six-month-a-year job to probably a nine-month job,” Marcus Fagent, the groundsman at Valley End Cricket Club, west of London, told The National.

“Now the grass is growing year round, certainly through November into December, so there’s more work and therefore actually we’re burning more diesel to cut grass that’s growing.”

Valley End is recognised as one of England’s most sustainability-minded clubs after planting 500 trees, measuring its carbon footprint and letting grass grow beyond the boundary to encourage local bird life, such as red kites.

High energy costs generated an electricity-saving drive at Valley End and it wants to go farther by putting solar panels on the roof of its timber-frame pavilion and replacing tractors and mowers with electric models.

But extremes of drought and rainfall in Britain are already taking their toll.

“Last summer we used more water than we normally would to water the square, to keep it safe, keep the grass growing. If we didn’t do that, we wouldn’t be playing cricket. It would be quite dangerous,” Mr Fagent said.

Then “because it was so wet in March and April we couldn’t cut the grass. The outfield was quite squidgy. So we lost the first four weekends of cricket, which is more than we’ve had previously”.

Extreme heat is a particular threat in certain Test-playing countries, such as India and Pakistan, which have endured record-breaking heatwaves that scientists expect to become more likely due to climate change.

Leaders of cricket in the UK are in reformist mode. Last week the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) vowed to implement an overhaul to address an independent report that said it was riven with racism, sexism and classism. It launched an equality, diversity and inclusion charter. Alongside this modernisation agenda is a search for what needs to change to meet the climate challenge.

Proposals include playing in shorts instead of trousers, offering ice packs to players and taking heat breaks in addition to the regular lunch, tea and drinks intervals. Drought-resistant grass is being explored in case water is scarce – in which case cricket grounds would hardly be first in the queue for hydration, said sustainability consultant Kishan Changlani.

“Cricket or any sport would become second priority, because the first priority would be food and drinking water for our people,” said Mr Changlani, who hosted a panel on cricket during London Climate Action Week.

He said another task was supporting umpires to withstand extreme heat without “taking the fun away” by turning all decision-making on the field over to machines.

“Umpires are there for the full day, every game, and they have to be more focused. They have hardly any room for error,” he said.

Richard Heller, a cricket writer, coined the phrase “planet stopped play” to describe the climate threat, using the game’s jargon.

“Cricket has become more vulnerable to extreme weather events than ever before,” he said.

“If these events continue at the rate that they have shown themselves in the past decade or so, cricket will actually be unplayable in major parts of the world, particularly in the Indian subcontinent where it’s so popular.”

Many in cricket are taking the issue seriously.

Australian captain Pat Cummins has an initiative called Cricket for Climate in which professionals help to buy solar panels for their childhood clubs.

The MCC’s World Cricket Committee of former players, which will reveal the results of its closed-door talks after the Lord’s Test has finished, is said to be looking at climate-friendly pitches and better-quality balls for floodlit cricket.

Not usually known for keeping up with the times, the MCC was lobbied to act by the late Australian bowler Shane Warne, a committee member who was “taken aback” by findings that cricket was under threat.

Traditionalists would be sure to object if the problem was tackled by playing more short-form Twenty20 games and fewer prestige Test matches, which can last five days.

Yet at local level the shift to shorter games is already happening, not least as women’s cricket becomes more popular and the volume of matches puts Mr Fagent’s pitches under strain.

Valley End may have to install hybrid pitches that are reinforced with artificial grass, but Mr Fagent said this was a labour-intensive process that not every club would be able to afford.

“Many clubs are not fortunate like we are in funding that time,” he said. “They’ll have a guy who comes in after work three nights a week.

"I think that’s not going to be enough, and so that threatens the sustainability of the game.”