Thank you to everyone who came to my talk and on the walk at The Good Life Experience festival in Flintshire on Sunday – great crowd!
Whilst on the walk, someone (thank you, Richard) pointed to the cricket ground and said that cricket wickets are normally aligned north-south. Although the one we were looking, on the Hawarden Estate, wasn’t – it has more of a WSW-ENE alignment (above).
It did make sense though, as it reduces the likelihood of the batsmen having the sun in their eyes at the start and end of the day. I’ve written about how this is broadly true for tennis courts in The Natural Navigator.
I decided to investigate cricket wickets in a lazy, Google Earth kind of way. What better way to celebrate the Rugby World Cup?
There does on first glance appear to be a slight preference for a north-south alignment, but it is fairly weak, as these images of the venues of the last Ashes series show. North is at the top of the picture in each case.
(For the keen:
One thing that his noticeable is that the wickets that deviate most from a N-S alignment, Lords and Cardiff, have a strong tendency towards SW-NE, as opposed to NW-SE. This makes perfect sense as afternoon sun is more of a problem in cricket than early morning sun and it is a summer game. The sun sets well north of west near midsummer, so a batsman facing SW will not have to squint too badly. Any very early starts would be a disaster though, fortunately cricketers don’t get out of bed until about lunchtime.)
Trent Bridge
Cardiff
The Oval
Lords
Edgbaston
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