On Tour With Grasshoppers

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30976, 4 February 1966, Page 15

On Tour With Grasshoppers

High temperatures, drought, a plague of grasshoppers, and long hours of weary travel were all experienced by the Canterbury Kiwis, an under-21 cricket team, in their recent tour of northern New South Wales.

However, considering the discomfort, the team returned home with a fine record: it won two matches outright, gained two first innings wins, and had a first innings loss. After flying 2000 miles from Christchurch to Lismore the team played cricket for six consecutive days in scorching heat. Travelling between matches was done at night and always involved distances of several hundred miles by buses and cars as well as aeroplanes. Only on one day of the 18-day tour was the temperature less than 90 degrees. DRY AND ROUGH

The Intense drought at the time made the pitches and outfields vary greatly from match to match. Hard, fast pitches with good outfields were provided at Lismore and Grafton, which are both on the coast and have a reasonable rainfall.

Inland, the conditions were not as good. The outfields at Walcha, Armidale, Inverell and Maree were very poor,

with Walcha and Inverell the worst.

Armidale and Maree were dry and rough, but Walcha was plagued by grasshoppers and a coarse weed while Inverell had little grass and was covered in a loose, sandy soil which gave the batsmen little chance of hitting boundaries. BATSMEN’S NIGHTMARE

The Walcha pitch was matting on clay and, because of the dryness, played unreliably. Both the Armidale and Inverell wickets were watered before play began and so qualified as genuine stick wickets. The Maree wicket lasted only two hours before developing into a batsman’s nightmare.

But at Tamworth, where the “test” against the North New South Wales Emus was played, there was a lush green pitch and although it quickened a little during the game, it was playing as truly after three days as it had at the beginning.