Faster and bouncier cricket pitches using locally available clays

Abstract

Reasons for the lack of 'pace & bounce' in Sri Lankan pitches has been a topic of debate for a long time. In order to address this problem from an engineering perspective, soil samples from Test venue in Colombo were gathered, analyzed and then compared to available data from other countries. Local pitches were found to have high silt content, low clay content and low plasticity due to a difference in clay mineralogy. Small scale model pitches were built and then tested to find the effect of adding commercially available clays on the pitch characteristics.