By: Peter Xiao
Cricket is the world’s second most popular sport with 2.5 billion fans. There’s a running joke with cricket fans that if you want it to rain during this wetter-than-usual summer in the Caribbean, start a cricket match. With climate change growing worse, the joke is becoming a reality.
Matches can last up to five days, with even one-day matches extending over seven hours. On top of the intense game, players also have to face the weather. Climate change is causing heat waves to become hotter, last longer, and be more frequent, with 20 out of 21 of the warmest years recorded being in the 21st century.
Back in June, the West Indies cricket team arrived in Pakistan to play three matches, with temperatures as high as 111 degrees Fahrenheit. Akeal Hosein, one of the players, described the heat, “It honestly felt like you were opening an oven.” He and his teammates wore ice vests during breaks to cool down.
The difficulties with climate change aren’t new to cricket players. They’ve dealt with similar incidents in the past. In 2017, Sri Lankan players had to wear masks and have oxygen canisters because of pollution, with some players still vomiting. In 2018, Joe Root, the English cricket captain, was hospitalized for a combination of gastrointestinal problems, severe dehydration, and heat stress in Sydney, Australia.
Also in 2018, an extended drought limited Indian players to showers of two minutes in Cape Town. During a fire crisis in 2019 in Sydney, the air filled with smoke, and player Steve O’Keefe described it as feeling like “smoking 80 cigarettes a day.”
In addition to the heat, cricket players also have to watch out for rain. Rain caused the West Indies to abandon a match in Dominica and it shortened matches in Guyana and Trinidad. In 2017, hurricanes Irma and Maria damaged stadiums in five countries throughout the Caribbean.
A 2019 report on the relationship between cricket and climate change stated that a professional batsman playing over a day could create heat equal to that of a person running a marathon. Cricket players also have to wear pads, gloves, and a helmet which restricts sweat evaporation, unlike marathon runners.
Daren Ganga, a former West Indies captain, commented on the need for action, “Action needs to be taken for us to manage this situation because I think we’ve gone beyond the tipping point in some areas. We still have the opportunity to pull things back in other areas.”
Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/04/sports/cricket/cricket-climate-change-sustainable.html