A fortnight before they arrive in India on a six-week tour to a warm, muggy welcome, the New Zealand cricket team has been braving freezing cold and heavy snow while training back home. While they could face temperatures of 40-odd degrees (in Ahmedabad and Rajkot) on their tour here, the mercury in Christchurch, near where they’ve been based, hovers around the zero mark.The team reached Brisbane today, where the weather will be warmer — in the late 20s and early 30s.Ironically, the Black Caps had planned to simulate an Indian summer but, as they trained at the National Cricket Academy (NCA) or the High Performance Centre (HPC) in Lincoln, near Christchurch, they found out just why it was not quite the same as the real thing.‘‘We just were not able to reproduce the Indian heat’’, Karl Johnson, Turf Manager at the HPC, told The Indian Express. ‘‘In Christchurch the temperatures ranged between freezing point early in the day and rose to only 12 or 13 degrees as the day wore on.’’Johnson said his role was to prepare two nets for the cricketers over four days. ‘‘This was a difficult task, we even had frost turning the covers into a sheet of ice when we tried to take them off in the morning.’’ While they failed to replicate the Indian heat, the plans to play on ‘dirty’ (read: dusty) pitches succeeded, says Johnson. Interim Kiwi coach Ashley Ross had planned that the batsmen would practice on indoor artificial pitches with dirt, string and paper sprinkled on them. It was successful, says Johnson: ‘‘The ball used to deviate off the dirt and was just the right way to build for an Indian tour with the low and slow pitches.’’Also part of the plan was to play with headphones on and the volume turned up so that they could adjust to playing in a typical Indian stadiumn. The training was attended by all the team members — barring a couple who were playing county cricket in England. In Brisbane, they will train at the Allan Border Oval and play a few warm-up games before leaving for India.The India tour, which begins on September 26, includes two Test matches and a triangular one-day series with Australia as the third team.
