Only time will tell whether the inclusion of this World Cup, as well as cricket twenty 20 in the program of the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, will help to establish this sport in the USA, but there is a lot to talk about now. It is a sport that literally moves the Earth, overcomes two continents and travels 11, 000 miles to make this event possible.
The first slugger on Monday in New York will stand at the crash site, which began more than eight months ago in Adelaide, South Australia, when Sri Lanka competed when they played against South Africa in their first competitive match at this stadium.
From there we went through Savannah Harbor, Georgia, to Boynton Beach, Florida, where the lawn was planted and cultivated. At the end of April, he was loaded into a truck and sent on a 1000-mile journey to a new temporary international cricket stadium in Nassau County, where he and three other cars got into specially prepared pits without any problems.
“Since then, we have allowed him to grow and given him time to adapt to the natural conditions he is facing,” says Damian Hugh, who is in power of the project. “They gave him time to adapt. It is a living and breathing being that has gone through a rather exhausting process. In fact, it’s no different from people: you have a period of stress and you need to give it time to adapt and recover.”
Hugh is the main curator – that is, the gardener – at the Adelaide Oval, where he has been using open lawfuls since which gives him the experience that the international Cricket Council needs when he starts implementing this project. An alternative -the use of the field in Eisenhower Park on Long Island, where the stadium was built, was never possible.
“It’s just a parking lot. He was not suited for international world-class cricket competitions,” says Hugh. “The terrain was flat, but natural, with clay instead of a sandy profile. They had to add drainage, a sand profile, irrigation and a new turf to bring it in line with international standards for cricket. Despite the difficulties that the weather is facing, it’s awesome how quickly they cope with it.”
“They” that Hugh is talking about are Istek, a local company specializing in the construction of sports facilities, with whom he works at IRC. The steel containers in which the resin was grown and transported were made in Adelaide, but when they were filled, they were in Florida and their usual materials were not available. So he had to resort to something unusual: land for baseball fields, a kind of Bermuda grass, known as Tahoma 31, for lawns and Kentucky bluegrass for an open field. Hugh has never used it before. Then they just had to wait and hope.
“At certain times you have checkpoints where, for example, you measure the depth of the roots and you know what you want to achieve,” he says. “At every stage we have exceeded all expectations. We have more root depth than we can do at home, we could not promote root growth like here.
“There is a climate in Florida that it is impossible to grow grass in this part of the world. So, everything that happened on this path was simply “God, everything went well”. Hopefully this will lead to some really good cricket and really good fields. There are difficulties on this path, to which it is necessary to adapt. But such is the life of a curator.