Sunday, December 18, 2005

Chinnaswamy Cricket Stadium



The room in Chinnaswamy Stadium where the Strand Book Stall sale was held is a particularly fine room. About 10,000 sq ft in size, it has fine paintings of former and current Indian cricketers from Karnataka. Included are such greats as Prasanna, Kumble, GR Vishwanath, Srinath, Venkatesh Prasad, and others.

The Sri Lankan cricket team was supposed to practice the weekend the sale started. For all of Saturday, the dark skies and continual drizzling made any practice impossible. The pitch and the surrounding area had to be kept covered for most of the day.


The groundsmen did try to keep the pitch dry by lighting small fires at either end of the pitch! I wish I had a zoom lens so I could have taken a closer shot :) At other times they use coal based irons to dry the pitch.

Sunday was a better day. The skies opened up, and the Sri Lankan team could get a good day's practice in. It didn't really help though, as the first test match in Chennai was almost completely washed out. Talk about scheduling screw-ups! India lost a good opportunity of winning the third test of the India-Australia series earlier in the year at Chennai because the final day's play was washed out, with India in a good position at the end of the fourth day's play.

© 2005, Abhinav Agarwal (अभिनव अग्रवाल). All rights reserved. Reposted to this blog, Nov 2012