Weather Looks Good For Cricket (20 April 1999)

20 April 1999

Weather Looks Good For Cricket

Hayden Gill in Georgetown

Guyana's notoriously fickle weather, always a major threat to regional and international cricket matches here, seems likely to be on the good side for tomorrow's fifth Cable & Wireless One-Day International between West Indies and Australia.

Heavy downpours during the first part of last week prompted doubts over the match, but the two teams arrived yesterday evening under sunny skies at the Cheddi Jeagan International Airport.

After persistent rain last Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, there were murmurs in Port-of-Spain over the weekend that the match could have been shifted to either the Queen's Park Oval or Kensington Oval.

But there has been no significant rain here since Friday and preparations at Bourda have not been adversely affected.

The outfield was in fine shape last night and dry enough that it could accommodate chairs for a function hosted by the Guyana Cricket Board (GCB) to honour distinguished persons who have made significant contributions to West Indies cricket.

Chief groundsman Culdip David said everything was on stream for tomorrow's key match that will give either side a 3-2 lead ahead of the final two matches in Barbados this weekend.

"The preparations have been coming all right. The rain did not really affect us," he said.

"The ground was not under much water, just around the boundaries. We have had no problems with the outfield."

David was not committed to say what type of pitch to expect, but the feeling is that it will favour batsmen.

The Guyana public has been starved of regional cricket this year and the match is the only opportunity in which they will get to see either a first-class or international match this season.

With the knowledge that several regional matches have often been affected by the unkind weather, the GCB successfully made a request to the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) to play all of their Busta Cup matches away from home.

As it turned out, there was not persistent rain, meaning that there would have been a chance for several days' cricket.

In recent years, the WICB has made an effort to tackle the rain by acquiring covers which cover the whole Bourda ground. Egbaston in Birmingham, England, is the only other ground with such covers.

Both the West Indies and Australia arrived here following a delay of just under an hour-and-a-half following the late detection of an electrical problem in the aircraft's cockpit. The plane was just about making final preparations for take-off before it had to return to the ramp position at the Piarco International Airport.

West Indies came in without coach Malcolm Marshall, who returned to Barbados with a bout of influenza. There are also concerns over the wrist of captain Brian Lara and a damaged nail on the right first finger of off-spinner Nehemiah Perry.

Source :: The Barbados Nation (https://www.nationnews.com/)