How Hybrid Pitches Have Unlocked a New Era of Sporting Theatre at Edgbaston

It’s no secret the cricket calendar is a lot busier than it used to be. So busy, in fact, that we now have a term for the challenge it lays down for those playing the game and maintaining the wickets throughout the year: fixture congestion.

It’s all good for the game, though not without its challenges. Cricket is reaching more people than ever – and the diversity of formats has secured a future with new audiences across the world.  But, in the UK at least, all this growth is happening within the same stadiums, many of which have existed for decades.

For groundspeople, there is now simply too much traffic to maintain a consistent and even bounce across all competitions, especially when relying solely on all-natural turf. It was this realisation that led the team at Edgbaston to consider a new surface technology – one that has unlocked a previously unattainable level of durability and consistency.

The move has created room for more double-headers and plenty of drama for the fans – a real boon for the ‘people’s home of cricket’. It has also accommodated the growing success of the women’s game, with the Bears now boasting both men’s and women’s squads.

However, as Gary Barwell, Edgbaston’s Head of Sports Turf explains, reaching this point has been several years in the making. We caught up with Gary to get the full innings.

Edgbaston is now one of a growing number of major cricket grounds with a SIS Grass Hybrid pitch installed on its main playing area. This work has been a huge success, allowing the stadium to better manage cricket’s increasingly busy schedule without compromising performance. It’s also provided parity, allowing the women’s teams to practice and compete on the same pitches as the men.

The stadium’s experiments with a hybrid pitch can be traced back to 2017 – and, oddly enough, because of an entirely different sport. While the technology has been around since the late ‘80s and used for elite-level cricket competition since 2019, it was the hybrid’s success in football that got the ball rolling in Birmingham: “It all started after the Champions Trophy,” says Barwell. “As one of three grounds used for the tournament, we began to see the square suffer and good playing conditions became much harder to maintain. Once it concluded, we began looking at our options. The hybrid concept emerged as a frontrunner after a visit to St. George’s Park, the FA’s national football centre.”

An interest in replicating hybrid’s successes for cricket led Barwell to SIS Pitches – and more specifically SIS Grass Hybrid. Unlike other hybrid systems that are more complicated to install, SIS Grass Hybrid uses the patented Universal machine, injecting a small percentage of polymer fibre into a stadium’s natural turf. This composition is more resilient to stresses created during play, helping to prolong the life of a playing surface, guarantee an even bounce and ease pressure on busy groundspeople. Completed installations are predominantly natural grass, with around 5% of polymer fibre used. This ensures the characteristics of an all-natural pitch are maintained.

It was this mix of convenience, resilience and playability that appealed to Barwell, with Edgbaston subsequently trialling the technology in late 2017, ahead of another major milestone for innovation in cricket.

Edgbaston’s move into hybrids coincided with a growing interest in new surfaces among cricket’s elite. In 2017, the England Cricket Board signed off on two hybrid wickets at its National Performance Centre in Loughborough, another SIS Pitches installation. Much like Barwell, the ECB opted for the trial having noticed the success of hybrid surfaces in the Premier League.

In 2019, following positive feedback from county clubs, the ECB then sanctioned hybrids for use in the Royal London One Day Cup, Vitality Blast and all formats of Second XI cricket. This decision set the stage for major stadiums, like Edgbaston, to begin integrating the surface within elite-level competition. “We continued to use the technology in the intervening years,” adds Barwell. “This period allowed us to fully understand how the fibres interacted under different moisture conditions, as well as the system’s impact on natural grass growth.”

With the ECB sanction and a pause to tournament play due to the pandemic, Edgbaston found itself with a window to install its first two pitches within the main square. This work, which took place in late 2020, proved particularly effective for the shorter, more intense T20 format hosted once lockdowns eased and sport recommenced across the country.

For Edgbaston, the impact of SIS Grass Hybrid is best seen through the success of several major competitions, chiefly among them the Commonwealth Games held in 2022. During the games, the stadium hosted 16 international women’s matches played over a two-week period. With an all natural pitch, this intense window of competition would typically require a high number of maintenance intervals to keep wickets up to standard. With SIS Grass Hybrid, however, the window was expanded, allowing top-level performance without major interventions so often from the grounds team.

“On traditional pitches, you see really good performance on day one, but there’s typically a steep decline once you get into days three or four,” Barwell notes. “We noticed with hybrids you could play on them over 10-12 days and not see a drop off. You only have to prepare one pitch, as opposed to two or three for the same amount of game time. This was massive for us during the games, with 60,000 people in the stadium and many more watching around the world.”

It’s often said that stats only tell part of the story in sport, but for SIS Grass Hybrid at Edgbaston the numbers really do speak for themselves. In 2024, the ground was able to facilitate 55 matches across all formats – the most of any ground in the country. To put that in context, it’s more than double the number of matches hosted at Edgbaston when Barwell first joined as Head of Sports Turf in 2012.

With hybrids now approved by the ECB for some red-ball competition, there is seemingly more to come at Edgbaston. “We’ll continue to invest in our hybrid surface because it’s proven effective at the highest level,” says Barwell. “For us, it’s about lowering the maintenance requirement while also delivering the best possible performance – for both players and fans. SIS Grass Hybrid has given us that option. Sporting theatre at its best.”