Australia’s tour of India may feature the biggest crowd in cricket history when the players take the field at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, with its jaw-dropping capacity of 110,000.
Although the BCCI is yet to confirm venues for the series, it is looking increasingly likely that the four Tests in February and March next year will be hosted by Nagpur, Delhi, Dharamsala and Ahmedabad.
The Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad.Credit:AP
The stadium in Ahmedabad has hosted matches as far back as the early 1980s, when it was known as Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Cricket Stadium, but underwent a major rebuild between 2015 and 2020 when it was named after India’s populist prime minister Narendra Modi.
The first event it hosted was a joint rally for Modi and then United States president, Donald Trump, in February 2020, a few weeks before COVID-19 swept the globe.
A year later, the stadium was used for two Test matches between England and India, and this year was the venue for the Indian Premier League final, witnessed by 104,859 spectators.
The biggest official attendance for a Test match day was Boxing Day in the 2013-14 Ashes fixture at the MCG, when 91,112 spectators attended.
Among the other venues, Dehli’s Arun Jaitley Stadium, once known as the Feroz Shah Kotla, has been an unhappy hunting ground for Australia, winning there only once as far back as 1959 and failing to win any of the six Tests played there since.
Australia also lost their only Test match in Dharamshala, the decisive game of the epic 2017 series that India won 2-1 after surrendering the first Test in Pune on a sharply turning track.
Nagpur, expected to be the other venue, was the scene of Australia’s drought-breaking series victory in 2004, albeit at the old cricket ground in the centre of town. In 2008, Jason Krejza took 12 wickets on his debut in an Australian defeat at the Vidarbha Cricket Association Stadium.
The vagaries of Indian cricket politics have ensured that Australia has now gone quite some time without playing Test matches at numerous major venues. The last Test between Australia and India at Kolkata’s Eden Gardens was in 2001, the last at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai in 2004.
A massive crowd attending the Namaste Trump event at Sardar Patel Stadium in Ahmedabad in 2020.Credit:AP
George Bailey, the selection chair, has already flagged that Australia will take a large squad to India to account for conditions that will not only be different to home conditions but may also vary from venue to venue and, perhaps, depending on the results of earlier Tests in the series.
“I would envisage that the Test tour to India may have some different names to it than what the team does over the summer,” Bailey said. “Just because the conditions that we expect to face are every chance to be very different again.
“You probably take a slightly bigger squad anyway – I don’t think we’d be taking a skinny squad across there, plus it’s at the back of a summer and there’s a reasonable amount of cricket that would have been played by then.”
Glenn Maxwell’s hopes of making the tour have been hit by a broken leg he suffered in a freakish accident at a friend’s 50th birthday party on the weekend.
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