Drought in southern Africa means cricket must look hard in the mirror

Evan Flint has his feet up, at last. It is day four of the final Test between England and South Africa and, as chief groundsman, all he can do is watch as Rassie van der Dussen and Dean Elgar grind out the beginnings of a doomed rearguard action.

Flint has been at the Wanderers since last spring, lured north after 10 and a half years at Newlands, where he won groundsman of the year during his last two seasons. He had had a lot to cope with.

In January 2018 Cape Town officials announced that, after three years of insufficient rain, the city was three months away from Day Zero (running out of water). The visiting India team were told not to shower for more than 90 seconds, the India and South Africa sides gave a combined donation of 100,000 rand to the Gift of the Givers Foundation (disaster relief in Africa), fights broke out over water from the nearby Newlands borehole and club and schools cricket was cancelled halfway through the season.

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Three weeks before Day Zero, Australia and South Africa played a Test in Cape Town – subsequently overshadowed somewhat by the discovery of sandpaper down Cameron Bancroft’s trousers.

Newlands is well served by boreholes but Flint remembers it as a difficult time: “We were in the thick of it but it was an opportunity to show the rest of the world that we were doing our bit, almost like a badge of honour.”

He had to water the pitch; it has a very high clay content so otherwise would have cracked, but the outfield was something else. “At one point we were watering it maybe twice a week at most and it was very brown. It looked terrible but the last thing we wanted as Day Zero approached was for people to put on the telly and look at a lush cricket field.”

“You know what people are like, they announce water restrictions and nobody believes it, so it was a personal decision to adhere to what the authorities said. We used borehole water but we acknowledged there was a drought on and we were playing our part.”

“It made me realise that the grass doesn’t need as much water as we think. It taught me that you are doing the turf a bit of a disservice to spoon-feed it every day. I learned that it is when you water that’s important, rather than how much.”

Day Zero was eventually averted but sport in South Africa is under strain in a volatile changing climate. Temperatures in the interior of the country are rising at twice the global level according to the International Panel on Climate Change and southern Africa as a whole is facing unprecedented strain. The UN World Food Programme has warned of a hunger crisis on “a scale we’ve not seen before”, blaming, largely: “The cumulative effects of climate-related natural disasters in the form of recurrent widespread droughts. The region has had only one normal rainy season in the past five years amid cyclones and persistent flooding.”

Malawi has also had to contend with an influx of fall armyworms, while further north plagues of locusts currently swarm over Kenya.

In South Africa the Eastern Cape is still under severe strain, with many of the new boreholes not producing the desired results because ground water levels are so low, a situation the government has called critical.

Level 2 water restrictions were announced in October, even in Johannesburg, but the big difference for Flint as a groundsman is the summer rainfall in Jo’burg – in Cape Town the rain falls, or should fall, in the winter. Nor does he miss the south-easterly wind that hits Cape Town from the spring: “They don’t put that in the brochures.”

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The Wanderers also has the benefit of wonderful ground irrigation, every drop of rain that falls on the stadium roof or gutters runs into a reservoir at the back of the ground to be stored away.

The changing climate – declining rainfall and temperature changes – has made Flint question some of groundskeeping’s most cherished ideals. “Cape Town was an eye-opener,” he says. “We have great water harvesting at the Wanderers because we are an international ground but certainly a lot more could be done in council and club facilities and there should be more research into artificial surfaces because they don’t require the maintenance, the cutting and the fuel, etc.

“Of course many municipalities have got greater things to worry about but more education would help. I say this with this beautiful turf in front of me, and professional sportsmen want to play on grass, but artificial surfaces do make sense. I’m being really sacrilegious now but think about golf courses. The enormous amounts of water those things guzzle is extraordinary.”

Despite all this, the climate crisis is not something that Flint finds crops up in conversation much, either in cricket or groundskeeping circles. “It’s been a bit disappointing. We meet up once a year as groundsmen and we discussed the Cape Town drought but, apart from that, not really. Once it starts raining, people go back to their own ways. But if you don’t have any water, my goodness, you can’t live.”

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