World Sports Park to debut with Canada-Suriname game

The first major cricket match at the new World Sports Park in Indianapolis will be played between Canada and Suriname on Sunday, May 3 in the opening match of the ICC Americas Division One Twenty20 tournament, according to a schedule released by tournament organisers.

USA's first match on the turf pitch will take place that same day, when the defending champions take on Bermuda in the afternoon. The Central Broward Regional Park in south Florida had hosted the tournament on three occasions in the last seven years but the ICC opted to stage this year's event at a venue far from America's traditional cricket strongholds on the east and west coasts.

According to a source in the mayor's office, a pitch curator from New Zealand is expected to arrive this week to work on final preparations for the turf strips that will be used for the tournament. The double-round robin event will feature six days of cricket with two matches per day on the same field. The facility does not have international standard floodlights but there should be plenty of time to get both matches in with local sunset time at 8.40pm from the first day.

The $5 million WSP complex, eight miles east of downtown Indianapolis, is located in a residential zone adjacent to a private airport. It was initially supposed to have a final cost of $6 million but a fourth multi-purpose athletic field was not fully developed and plans to build a pavilion with food concession stands were also scrapped, according to a report in the Indianapolis Business Journal.

The cutbacks were made in June 2014, only a month after the city of Indianapolis terminated a three-year hosting agreement to stage the USACA T20 National Championships. The Indianapolis mayor's office had expected the partnership to be a revenue-generating event for the city in conjunction with a television rights deal, which eventually fell through.

The USACA National Championship was slated to be the first major tournament at the WSP in August 2014, instead of the ICC tournament. The Indianapolis mayor's office blamed a breakdown in communication with USACA - following the resignation of former CEO Darren Beazley in March 2014 - as one of the main reasons for breaking off their hosting agreement for the national championship.