Cricket on an astro pitch?

guapos

I'm thinking of buying some free standing stumps and playing cricket on an astro football pitch during the winter. I dont know much about cricket and only play the odd game of taveners.

is the surface suitable and would a football pitch be big enough?

Thanks

djimi

It depends on the surface. The shorter type of astro, the type used on all weather hockey pitches, would be grand provided you had a plastic ball to use (youll wreck a leather ball on astro). However if it is that fake grass style astro pitch, the one which you can use studded football boots on, Id imagine it would be too long to really use.

As for the size of the pitch, it will be plenty long but not very wide. You wont really get a proper game of cricket on it, but with some inventive rules you can come up with something that would be a lot of fun to play. We train on an astro pitch in winter and its great.

The one great thing about training on astro is your fielding will be top class because youll get used to the ball rocketing at you!

TheDrog

The pitch out in NUI Maynooth might be big enough. Haven't tried bouncing a ball on it yet to see if it works.

riffmongous

As djimi said the size of the pitch will be the biggest problem, try to get a place with nets along the side or else you'll be losing a lot of balls to slogs!

Also be very careful using a leather ball, the first time I tried playing a bit on the NUI Maynooth pitch my friend bowled a length ball that bounced up and almost took my head off. A cheap alternative is a "tape ball", just a tennis ball wrapped in masking tape, just keep taping it up until you get the right bounce

guapos

Thanks for the replies lads, ill have a look around for a good size pitch and cheap equipment

TrueDub

guapos wrote: »

Thanks for the replies lads, ill have a look around for a good size pitch and cheap equipment

A further suggestion - play diagonally on whatever pitch you get. It'll maximise the available area and mean that you wont have excessively short straight or square boundaries.