A NEW artificial cricket wicket is set to be built on a city playing field.

Worcester City Council plans to install the £9,000 synthetic wicket at the King George V Playing Fields off Brickfields Road.

It would be the city’s first free-to-use public cricket wicket to be built by the council.

A report, which will be discussed by the city council’s communities committee at a meeting this week, said interest in grassroots cricket has grown following the England men’s cricket team’s one-day World Cup success in 2019 and the introduction of the new one-day 100-ball Hundred competition.

The council said demand in Worcester has also grown with more children attending the England Cricket Board’s (ECB) Inspiring Generations programme which includes All Stars Cricket for five-to-eight-year-olds and Dynamos Cricket which caters for eight-to-11-year-olds and was launched last year.

Dynamos Cricket, which has links with the new Hundred competition, uses a modified soft ball to encourage youngsters to learn how to play cricket and eventually move to playing with a hard leather ball.

The council is also looking to bring more ‘tape ball’ games, which use a tennis ball wrapped in electric tape and has become popular among youngsters in cricket-loving nations such as Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, as well as other shorter formats of cricket to the new artificial wicket over fears that some of the city’s cricket fans are being ‘locked out’ of the game due to membership fees and local clubs being unable to provide the facilities for the different formats.

As a result, many of the city’s cricketers are forced to travel to Droitwich and Lower Moor to play.

Plans to set aside £10,000 to install the new wicket were discussed by councillors at the start of the year but a location had not yet been decided.

The council said the work would take around two days to complete and, if approved, should be installed at the end of the month in time for the second half of the cricket season which runs until the end of September.

The city council’s communities committee meets in the Guildhall from 7pm on Wednesday, June 8.