Ahmedabad: Narendra Modi stadium
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2021: renovation
K.ShriniwasRao, February 24, 2021: The Times of India
On the banks of the Sabarmati, spread over around 63 acres, lies a unique cricketing infrastructure more imposing than any other in the world — including the gigantic Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) — that will play host to the second-ever day and night Test match India have ever hosted.
It’ll also mark the return of cricket at the Sardar Patel Stadium after a five-and-a-half-year hiatus, with the stadium having undergone a complete makeover.
The venue, seeped in serious cricketing history.
The newly laid out bucket seats in the stadium shine so bright under the glare of the heavy floodlights here that it can time and again get a bit tricky for cricketers plying their trade for the first time. Almost everything inside this 1.32 lakh-capacity ground remains pretty-much untouched. Even at 50% crowd capacity, the stands are bound to expose more empty seats to the viewing eye than the filled ones, given the huge facility.
Pillarless, it offers a 360-degree view of proceedings, wider sight-screens that batsmen are already raving about, a symmetrical boundary for the bowlers to set their fields conveniently and everything else that a modern-day cricket setting would hope for. There’s some rich history too. Sunil Gavaskar’s 10,000th run came here and so did Kapil Dev’s 432nd wicket, overtaking Sir Richard Hadlee. This is also the venue where India won one of its most important matches in the 2011 World Cup, defeating Australia in the quarterfinals. Later, at the same venue, they beat England in the first Test of the 2012 series by nine wickets.
Motera is spread over 63 acres land. It has seating capacity for 1,32,000 spectators surpassing Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) which till now had the largest capacity of 90,000 spectators. The total stadium area is 2,38,714 square metres, which is equivalent to 32 Olympic size soccer fields put together.
The stadium has 11 pitches made of red and black soil and is the only stadiumin the world to have the same soil surfaces for the main and practice pitches.
The ground’s drainage system enables water to be drained off within 30 minutes from the time it stops raining.
The stadium , popularly called ‘Motera stadium’, was named Sardar Patel Stadium when it hosted the ‘Namaste Trump’ event in 2019.
