Pitches drop in on Darwin

Preparations for Bangladesh's maiden Test tour of Australia are fully underway. Two drop-in pitches, prepared at the Melbourne Cricket Ground and flown 2000 miles north to Darwin, have been installed at the Marrara Oval ahead of Darwin's inaugural Test on July 18, which will be followed by a one-day international on August 6.

Darwin's weather is too dry for the development of international-standard wickets, and so the drop-in technique, now fairly common in Australia and New Zealand, was the obvious solution. The pitches, which weigh 18 tonnes each, were split in half and lowered into place using a crane, before being rachetted back together in a process that took several hours.

The operation was overseen by Tony Ware, the curator at the MCG, who predicted that the soil-and-steel structure would make a good wicket for Darwin's tropical conditions. "It is really just a quite a heavy, sticky clay that obviously goes hard when it's dry," said Ware. "The pitch itself won't play overly quick. It would probably be as quick as a lot of Test venues around the world, but probably not as quick as our wickets are in Melbourne, for instance."

Ware added that the decision to split the pitch was made after problems with the drop-in wickets at the Colonial (now Telstra) Stadium in Melbourne during the one-day series against Pakistan last year. "In Colonial last year, we put a Super Challenge wicket in and it wasn't able to be joined in the middle so it opened up a little bit in the join," said Ware. "What we've done is developed a bolt system and a ratchetting system so that we can actually pull the two halves of the frame together very tightly. That just gives us an extra level of guarantee that the join across is not going to cause any issues during the matches."

Ware added that other preparations in Darwin were going well, and a quick outfield was anticipated. "Obviously, there is a lot of work going on around the venue with new scoreboards and new boxes being built,and other facilities. It's all coming together really well for the match in July."

The Australian Cricket Board, meanwhile, has announced a strong Academy team for the three-day match against Bangladesh which begins on July 3 at Allan Border Field in Brisbane. Three Western Australian players, Scott Meuleman, Luke Ronchi and Peter Worthington, and the South Australian Mark Cleary have all made their domestic four-day debuts in the Pura Cup, while 18-year-old South Australian batsman Callum Ferguson made his one-day ING Cup debut against New South Wales in February this year.