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The weather outlook for the five days starting this afternoon is excellent, for any sports or in this case the first Test between Australia and Sri Lanka.
A sprinkle is the worst thing that the ground will get from the heavens this morning.
Apart from that temperatures will be consistently in the low 30s during the day, and around the mid-20s in the evening.
Light winds will prevail throughout the five days, however one thing that you can be sure of is how the humidity – at around 65-75 per cent each night – will affect the pitch.
How will it affect the ball? In weather parlance it will come down to the dew point level, and that will be around twenty-one degrees once the sun goes down, in the final couple of hours each night.
As it is a test and not a shorter match, a whole gambit of permutations will begin to salivate our senses, especially come night-time.
The extra millimetres of grass on a somewhat already firm pitch will count for nothing when the medium and fast balls come down at their normal speed.
But with the extra grass and on top of it, the dew, then a whole new can of worms comes into play.
My belief is that either or one of the speeds bowled down to the batsmen will not rise as normal, and
this will lead to more leg byes and slips catches – that’s got to be more difficult for the batsmen and some fielders in slips and gully.
But what if one team spends more than their fair share batting than bowling in the evening? I see two-thirds of the game played in daylight, and the rest of the day’s game at night.
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