ECB confirm day/night LVCC Championship match, Kent v Glamorgan

The ECB have confirmed that the LV= County Championship match between Kent and Glamorgan at Canterbury, from Monday 12 to Thursday 15 September, will be played as a day/night match, in white clothing with a pink ball.

The hours of play will be 2pm – 9pm each day, with the usual 30 minutes available on each of the first three days to make up for any time lost on that day. The floodlights will be turned on at 5.30pm each day, or earlier if required, should natural light deteriorate.

Managing Director of Cricket, Colin Metson, said: “We are delighted to help the ECB develop the game of cricket. We were approached on Monday afternoon, and asked if the Club would be prepared to play under floodlights, and responded immediately that we would be. We are very pleased that the ECB has now confirmed that Glamorgan and Kent will take part in this historic occasion.”

Whilst this will be Glamorgan’s first-ever floodlit County Championship match, Glamorgan’s cricketers, over the past decade or so, are no strangers to floodlit matches, with the Welsh county having played in over 80 day/night games. Their first taste of floodlit cricket came during the late 1980s and early 1990s, with matches against the Rest of the World at Swansea, using the rugby ground’s floodlights and on a matting wicket on the rugby pitch.

The first orthodox floodlit game was staged against Warwickshire at Edgbaston in August 1998, with their National League encounter against Essex at Cardiff in June 2000 being the first-ever at their headquarters. This, though, was using temporary floodlights, and a permanent structure was installed at Sophia Gardens in the winter of 2004/05.

Since then, over a half a dozen floodlit games have been staged each year at the SWALEC Stadium, as well as a series of day-night One-Day Internationals and Twenty20 contests.