Ken Borland

Cricket South Africa are excited by the prospect of experimenting with day/night Tests, acting chief executive Jacques Faul said in Johannesburg on Thursday.

Faul told a news conference that the instruction given to the Full Member Countries to begin investigations into the viability of day/night Tests had been the highlight of the International Cricket Council’s Chief Executives Committee meeting in Kuala Lumpur this week.

“We were encouraged to try and host night Tests. Obviously our board must first approve this and then we have to get the buy-in of our coach and players, and then of course the opposition still have to agree!

“But the idea really excites me and it was the highlight of the chief executives’ meeting for me,” Faul said.

“I understand that we’ll use a pink ball and, according to the New Zealand CEO [David White], Kookaburra have made a ball that is good enough for night Tests.”

While Faul was thrilled with the prospect of day/night Test cricket, he warned that it would be too risky to just rush into the new playing times.

“Maybe it’s the way forward for test cricket to evolve and it could be very beneficial for the longer forms of the game. But I’d be nervous just rushing into it at Test level, we’ll probably start with a first-class match,” he said.

“It’s early days, but I can see it happening in the near future. I’m just scared of the different conditions between day-time and night-time and the dew factor at certain of our grounds.”
Faul also confirmed that the Champions League T20 tournament would be coming back to South Africa this year, after Sundar Raman, a member of the CLT20’s technical committee, confirmed it on the social network Twitter.

“The protocol is for CLT20 to announce it first, but you can’t beat a tweet and it’s only fair to our public that I say ‘yes, we are hosting it’,” Faul said.

The acting CEO said the CLT20 board’s decision to go back to South Africa in October after they hosted the 2010 tournament was due to Indian venues not being available.

“India obviously have a lot of venues that could host the tournament, but the venues of the teams that qualified have problems.

“Mumbai will have a problem hosting a Pakistan team, for obvious reasons [the 2008 terrorist attacks], it’s monsoon time in Chennai and Kolkata has a religious festival, which leaves only Delhi,” Faul said.