Shamik Chakrabarty in Cuttack
Rohit Sharma was lighting up the Barabati Stadium when floodlights conked off. The stadium has eight light towers, one of them fell asleep. In the majority of the smaller centres, mismanagement could be the name of the game. The floodlights fiasco during the second ODI between India and England here in Cuttack showed the Odisha Cricket Association (OCA) in a bad light.
At 6.15 pm, with India on 48/0, chasing 305 for victory, lights went off, halting the proceedings. It was a brief pause, for lights came back around 6.23 pm and play was about to resume. But the lights went out again. Players cooled their heels in the dug-out for around 35 minutes before normality returned and the game re-started.
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The excuse was readily offered, and the people in charge here blamed it on a generator failure. “The generator attached to the floodlights (tower) malfunctioned, so the lights were off on that particular stand behind the clock tower. Now we have got the back-up generator on. It took time to change the connection from one generator to the other, which caused the delay. Now it’s OK,” said an OCA official. He stressed that during the testing of the light towers over the past five days, no problems were detected.
The fact of the matter is that this has happened at this venue in the past as well – during an ODI between India and Sri Lanka in 2009. Also, the overall mismanagement, from a very small number of tickets for public sale to internet issues at the press box, once again puts the match-organising capability of centres like this under the scanner.
International matches at Barabati are few and far between. The venue is hosting an ODI after a gap of five years. An OCA official was lamenting over it. Everything around this stadium needs a facelift for the state association to make its case stronger.
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