Eden Park: Getting the ground ready using decades of data

Eden Park is getting ready for another big summer of sport and entertainment, transforming from a rugby stadium to a cricket ground to a concert venue - and often back again - sometimes in the space of just a few days.

The All Blacks' Bledisloe Cup thrashing of the Wallabies on 10 October was Eden Park's last rugby match for the year. On Friday the ground hosts a Twenty20 between the Black Caps and India, with a 50-over match five days later.

The carefully-manicured outfield will have its grass trimmed from the rugby length of 30mms down to about 13mms, but the most obvious change is the drop-in cricket pitch, lowered carefully into place by a 20-tonne transporter.

Drop-in pitches are a major advantage at a multi-purpose stadium. Head groundsman Blair Christensen said they allowed the ground staff an additional element of control over preparation.

"We're able to manage them exclusively away from content, play, traffic, things like that, in our nursery area and then bring them in almost sometimes pre-prepared. Perfect condition, grass and profiles, levels, everything, no excuses."

The performance of any international cricket pitch is always heavily scrutinised, and that intensity only increased when India came to town. But with decades of experience and data backing him up, pre-match nerves were a thing of the past for Christensen.

"For the last 20 years I've been taking samples out of these cricket pitches, measuring them, weighing them, drying them, re-weighing them, putting them into spreadsheets and crunching some numbers and coming out with data that over a long period of time has created a database now that I've got a a very good idea of where I'd need to be, relative to previous performances of pitches."

Nothing was left to chance when it came to rolling out the perfect pitch. The days of a pitch's characteristics being assessed by a commentator with a car key are long gone.

"I write everything down. So not just measuring moisture content, bulk density, pore saturation. Every single time I do it, I create a sort of a notes tab as well which will talk about the texture of the grass, the uniformity, the density, the grass length, the colour, everything like that. And then I'll be able to look back on that too and describe how it performed, what were the comments, was it perfect? Was it not perfect? Is it worth replicating or not?"

The Eden Park pitches use Patumahoe clay - sourced in South Auckland - and only the best will do.

"They're tested for suitability, so that's their clay content, their textural analysis, so that's how much clay, silt and sand components, how fine is the sand, what's the percentage volume, linear shrinkage, so how much when it dries does it shrink, so that will play a role in the cracking patterns that you would see and how you manage them"

Cricketers would not be the only performers gracing Eden Park this summer, with Robbie Williams and Guns N' Roses playing before Christmas, while Bruno Mars has three shows in March.

Unlike sporting fixtures, crowds at concerts are allowed onto the hallowed turf, although virtually all the outfield will have protective covering.

"We sort of get away with most of it," said Christensen, "but we do have a turf farm where on occasions we do need to replace turf from under stages and where cranes have driven out to put in delay towers and things like that. So we sort of contemplate that, we plan for it, and we're pretty much available the following weekend."

They will need to be. Between concerts there is a steady diet of domestic cricket on the outer oval, while the Super Rugby season kicks off in the main stadium in February.