Heat Policy in Australian Cricket: Rules for Players and Crowds

The cricket heat policy in Australia does not begin with a temperature. It begins with an index. Cricket Australia's Heat Stress Risk Index takes four measurements from the ground on the day, shade air temperature, wind speed, relative humidity and sun exposure, and turns them into a single number that maps to a set of required actions. Below 4 you play as normal and use ordinary sun sense. From 4 to 7 you add drinks breaks. From 8 to 10 you take long cooling breaks off the field. Above 10 the match stops, and it does not restart until the index has been below 10 for at least half an hour.

That structure is the whole point. For most of the twentieth century Australian cricket, like most Australian sport, handled heat with a rule of thumb and a captain's discretion, and where a number existed it was a plain air temperature. The plain number is a poor instrument in this country. Thirty-eight degrees at Adelaide Oval in dry northerly air is a different physiological load from thirty-three degrees on a still, humid afternoon in Brisbane, and a fielding side is not doing the same work as a batter facing the second new ball. An index that carries humidity, wind and sun exposure separates those cases. A thermometer cannot.

This page sets out what the policy contains, how a decision is actually made on a Saturday morning in a suburban competition, how the junior rules differ, what changes at the elite level, and what a spectator should know before sitting on an unshaded bank in January. It also says plainly where the national policy stops and where your own association's local rules take over, because that boundary is where most confusion about the cricket heat policy in Australia comes from.

What the Australian Cricket Heat Policy actually is

The policy is a national framework document published by Cricket Australia and adopted, with local adjustments, by the state and territory associations and the leagues beneath them. It sets out the index, the bands, the interventions attached to each band, and the responsibilities of the people on the ground. What it does not do is run your competition. It gives associations a defensible, evidence-based method and then leaves them to write the operational detail: which forecast station is authoritative, who makes the call, by what time on a match morning, and how the decision is communicated.

That two-layer design is deliberate and it is why two clubs twenty kilometres apart can be governed by different numbers on the same day. It also means that when a player asks "what is the cricket heat policy in Australia", the honest answer has two halves. The national half is the index and the bands. The local half is the cut-off your competition publishes, and that is the one that will decide whether you drive to the ground.

The policy sits inside a broader set of participant safety documents that also cover concussion, lightning, and infectious illness. Heat is the one that bites most often, because in most of the country the cricket season runs straight through the hottest months of the year.

The Heat Stress Risk Index and its four inputs

The index requires four readings, and all four are ordinary weather observations rather than specialist measurements:

• Air temperature in the shade, in degrees Celsius. Shade matters. A thermometer sitting in full sun on a scoreboard will read several degrees high and will produce a false index.
• Wind speed, in kilometres per hour. Moving air carries away sweat and therefore heat. A breeze is not cosmetic; it materially changes how much thermal strain a bowler is under.
• Relative humidity, as a percentage. Humidity is the input a plain temperature rule misses entirely, and it is the one that makes a Queensland or Northern Territory afternoon dangerous at temperatures that would be unremarkable in Perth.
• Sun exposure, recorded as clear sky, partly cloudy, overcast or night. Radiant load from a clear sky at two in the afternoon is substantial, and it is why the same air temperature produces a different index in a day match and a night match.

Cricket Australia's guidance is to take the observation from the Bureau of Meteorology weather station closest to the ground. That is a practical instruction rather than a scientific ideal. Very few community grounds have their own instruments, and a BoM automatic weather station a few kilometres away is a far better input than somebody's estimate at the boundary rope.

The four HSRI bands and what each one requires

The bands are the operative part of the policy. Everything else is administration.

HSRI reading	Risk described as	What the policy requires
0 to 3	Not extreme	Play as normal. Manage heat with ordinary measures: drinks, hats, long-sleeved shirts, sunscreen.
4 to 7	Elevated	Consider extra or more frequent drinks breaks, for example every 20 to 30 minutes. Monitor players for cramping, dizziness and other early heat stress symptoms.
8 to 10	High	Take longer drinks breaks that bring participants off the field to cool down and rehydrate for an extended period, for example 15 to 30 minutes.
Above 10	Extreme	Suspend the match. Play may only resume once the index has been below 10 for a minimum of 30 minutes. If it does not improve, the match is abandoned.

Two details in that table are easy to skim past and are the ones that matter most in practice. The first is that the 8 to 10 band does not ask for a longer drinks break at the boundary. It asks for players to come off the ground, into shade, for a genuine cooling period of up to half an hour. That is a different instruction from a bottle at the rope and it needs somewhere to put twenty-two players. The second is the 30-minute floor on resumption above 10. Without it, an umpire would face pressure to restart the moment a cloud passed over.

Cricket Australia's guidance also notes that when conditions are expected to reach 4 or higher, the index should be re-measured regularly through the day, possibly hourly, rather than taken once at the toss. On a January afternoon the index normally peaks well after the start of play.

1. 1Morning forecast checkThe association's nominated official checks the Bureau of Meteorology forecast for the named weather station and applies the competition's published cut-off before the morning deadline.
2. 2Decision publishedA go or no-go decision is posted to the association website and notified to clubs, so that nobody travels to a ground for a match that has already been called off.
3. 3Pre-match index readingAt the ground, the four HSRI inputs are taken from the closest Bureau of Meteorology observation and the index is calculated before the toss.
4. 4Band determines interventionsThe index number is matched to its band, and the drinks and cooling requirements for that band are agreed between the umpires and both captains before play begins.
5. 5Re-measure during playWhen the index is 4 or higher it is re-checked through the afternoon, because in most Australian conditions the index peaks hours after the first ball.
6. 6Suspend above 10If the index passes 10 the match is suspended, and it can only resume after the reading has been below 10 for a continuous half hour.
7. 7Resume or abandonIf conditions improve for long enough the match restarts with the interventions for the new band. If they do not, the match is abandoned rather than crammed into the cooler part of the evening.

A structural summary of the decision sequence described in Cricket Australia's published weather guidance and in typical association heat policies. It is a description of process, not a measurement, and each association writes its own version of steps one and two.

Why Australian cricket moved away from a plain temperature number

The case against a single temperature threshold is easy to state. A rule that says "no cricket above 38 degrees" gives identical answers for two afternoons that are not remotely alike. It also produces a hard edge, where a forecast of 37 degrees means a full day of play and 38 means none, when the underlying physiology changes smoothly rather than in a step.

Research into Australian community sport heat policies through the 2010s found the same weaknesses across many sports: thresholds built on ambient temperature alone, humidity frequently ignored, and enormous inconsistency between neighbouring associations in the same sport. Cricket's own state-level policies were part of that picture. South Australian cricket's older rule used 37 degrees as the marker for excessively hot weather without factoring in humidity at all.

The index approach fixes the two obvious flaws. It brings humidity, wind and radiant load into the calculation, and it produces graded responses rather than a binary. It is not perfect. Any index is a model, and models are calibrated on populations rather than on the particular thirteen-year-old fielding at deep square leg. But it is a substantial improvement on a thermometer, and it gives an umpire something defensible to point at when a captain who wants to bat on disagrees.

The Pathway HSRI: a separate tool for under-18s

Cricket Australia publishes a second, more conservative index for participants under 18, described as the Pathway Heat Stress Risk Index. It is intended for junior matches, representative carnivals and junior training alike.

The reason is physiological rather than administrative. Children and adolescents carry more surface area per kilogram of body mass than adults, which means they absorb heat from the environment faster on a hot day. They sweat less efficiently, so their principal cooling mechanism is weaker. They are less reliable at recognising thirst and at pacing themselves, and in a representative carnival they may be asked to play consecutive days in the same conditions with poor sleep and unfamiliar food in between. A carnival is where the risk concentrates, because the format compresses several matches into a few days in the middle of summer.

Junior cricket in Australia already runs shorter formats on smaller grounds, which helps. Age-group cricket across the Australian cricket system is built around modified rules and reduced playing times, and a shorter match is a shorter heat exposure. But the heat tool is separate for a reason, and a coach who applies the senior bands to an under-13 side has misread the policy.

Who makes the call, and when

For community cricket the decision is made twice, by two different people, at two different times.

The pre-match decision belongs to the association. Most competitions nominate an official, commonly a competition or pennant chair, who checks the forecast for a named Bureau of Meteorology station and publishes a decision by a fixed morning deadline. The Geelong Cricket Association, whose policy is public and detailed, uses the Geelong Racecourse station and announces by 9.30am, posting the outcome to its website and to local radio. A deadline matters as much as a threshold: without one, clubs travel and then argue at the ground.

The in-play decision belongs to the umpires, working with the captains and any team manager or first-aid officer present. Once play has begun, the index is re-measured, the band determines the interventions, and it is the umpires who suspend the match if the reading goes above 10. That is a genuine responsibility and it is one of the reasons the umpire accreditation courses cover heat and weather explicitly.

Clubs sit underneath both. A club's job is to have shade, ice, water and a plan before the hot Saturday arrives, not to negotiate the threshold on the day.

What happens mid-match when the index climbs

Suppose a two-day grade fixture starts at 11am with an index of 6. The captains agree on drinks every 25 minutes. By 2.30pm a fresh reading returns 9. The band has changed, and the response now has to change with it: the players come off, into shade, for an extended cooling break rather than a two-minute pause at the rope.

By 4pm the reading is 11. Play is suspended. The clock starts. If a sea breeze arrives and the index drops to 8 by 4.20pm, that is not enough on its own; the reading has to stay below 10 for a full 30 minutes before the players go back out, so the earliest resumption is around 4.50pm. If it hovers at 10 or above through to the scheduled close, the match is abandoned for the day and the competition's rules on points and carried-over play take over.

Nothing in that sequence is discretionary once the readings are taken, which is the design intent. The judgement calls sit in the measurement, not in the response.

Drinks breaks, cooling and the over-rate problem

Extra drinks breaks create a scheduling conflict with over rates, and associations that ignore that conflict end up with captains quietly skipping breaks to avoid a penalty. Well-written local policies address it directly. Geelong's, for example, relaxes over-rate penalties on hot days so that extra breaks do not cost a side.

The other practical detail is what a cooling break needs to be effective. Standing in the sun at the boundary holding a bottle is not a cooling break. The interventions the policy has in mind involve getting out of the radiant load, ideally into shade or a clubroom, taking fluid in volume, and using cold water on the skin. A wet towel and an esky of ice cost a club almost nothing and do more for a fielding side than any amount of encouragement. Fast bowlers in particular need longer between spells on hot days, because bowling is the highest metabolic-rate activity on a cricket field by a wide margin, and the long formats of the Sheffield Shield reward the bowlers who can maintain pace deep into a hot afternoon.

How local associations translate the policy into a phone call

The national policy is an index. What a player experiences is a text message. Bridging the two is what association policies do, and they do it by converting an index into a plain forecast temperature that can be checked at 9am.

That conversion is a simplification, and associations know it. Its virtue is that it can be applied consistently by a volunteer at short notice across dozens of grounds. Its cost is that it loses the humidity and wind information the index was built to include. In practice most associations run both: a temperature trigger for the morning cancellation decision, and the index for the in-play interventions once a match has begun.

Lower-grade one-day matches cancelled38

All grades cancelled40

Forecast air temperature cut-offs published by the Geelong Cricket Association in its extreme heat policy. These are one association's local rules, not national Cricket Australia thresholds, and other associations publish different numbers. Shown to illustrate how an index-based policy is converted into a workable morning decision.

Show the numbers

Published cancellation thresholds at one Australian association

Item	Value
Lower-grade one-day matches cancelled	38
All grades cancelled	40

The Geelong example: 38 degrees and 40 degrees

Geelong's policy is worth reading in full because it explains its own reasoning, which most do not. Lower-grade one-day matches are cancelled at a forecast 38 degrees, and the stated reason is not that those players are less important. It is that lower grades play at remote grounds with fewer facilities, meaning less shade, less running water and often no clubrooms to retreat into. The same policy notes that lower grades tend to contain the oldest and youngest players in the association, which is exactly the population most vulnerable to heat illness. At 40 degrees, all cricket in all grades is off.

That is a good model of how to write a local rule: a threshold, plus the reason for it, plus a lower threshold for the cohort and the venues that carry more risk. It also shows why a single national temperature would be wrong even if the physiology allowed one. The facilities at a first-grade turf ground with a pavilion are not the facilities at a synthetic outground with a tree and a tap.

Training sessions are treated more strictly than matches

Cricket Australia's guidance on training is blunt: sessions must be suspended, cancelled or delayed at an index of 10 or above, and can recommence once the reading is below 10 provided the appropriate interventions can be implemented.

The strictness makes sense once you compare the two activities. A match gives a fielding side long passive periods and gives a batting side a shaded pavilion for ten of its eleven players. A training session gives everybody continuous work: throwdowns, fielding drills, running between wickets, and bowlers getting through more deliveries in ninety minutes than they would in a day's play. Training also happens late on weekday afternoons in November through February, which in much of Australia is the hottest part of the hottest months, and it is frequently held at a club's second ground where the shade and water are worst.

The practical answer most clubs land on is to move sessions later, shorten them, shift the skills work indoors to a centre with nets, and cancel outright rather than run a half-hearted version.

Recognising heat illness on a cricket ground

Cricket hides the early symptoms well. A fielder who is slow to a ball, a batter who plays a loose shot, a bowler who drifts down leg side, all read as a lapse in concentration rather than as physiology. But concentration loss is one of the first effects of thermal strain, and it is the one the policy asks captains and umpires to watch for alongside cramping and dizziness.

The progression worth knowing:

• Early: muscle cramps, headache, dizziness on standing, unusual irritability, heavy sweating, a noticeable drop in performance.
• Worsening: nausea, weakness, clammy pale skin, fast shallow breathing, a player asking to leave the field.
• Emergency: confusion, slurred speech, stumbling, collapse, or skin that has gone hot and dry because sweating has failed.

The emergency signs are a triple-zero call and immediate aggressive cooling: shade, remove pads and excess clothing, cold water over the skin, ice packs at the neck, armpits and groin. Do not wait to see whether a confused player improves after a sit down. Heat stroke is a time-critical condition and cooling started at the ground matters more than transport time.

The clothing and sun-protection side of the policy

Even in the lowest band the policy asks for something: drinks, hats, long-sleeved shirts, sunscreen. That is not filler. Australia's ultraviolet levels through the cricket season are extreme by world standards, and a cricketer's exposure profile is unusual, because the game keeps people outdoors for five or six hours in the middle of the day, repeatedly, from October to March.

Long sleeves in a light, loose weave are the counterintuitive part of that list. Covering skin does not make you hotter in dry conditions if the fabric is loose and light-coloured; it cuts radiant load and it removes the need to reapply sunscreen to your arms every session. Broad-brimmed hats do more than caps. Umpires, who stand still in full sun for the entire day without the shade of a pavilion, carry the highest single exposure on the ground, which is why the umpiring courses cover it.

Elite cricket: playing conditions, extra drinks breaks and the ICC index

At the professional level the mechanism is similar but the governing document is different. Sheffield Shield, Marsh Cup and Big Bash matches run under Cricket Australia playing conditions that include their own heat appendix, and international cricket in Australia runs under ICC playing conditions with an index of the ICC's own that also weighs temperature, humidity and wind. Where the community policy speaks of suspension, elite conditions lean much harder on additional drinks breaks, which can run to around four minutes rather than the usual short pause.

The reason elite cricket rarely stops for heat is not that professionals are immune. It is that a first-class ground has resources a suburban club does not: full-time medical staff, ice baths, cooling vests, shaded dugouts, hydration testing, and the option of rotating a bowler out of an attack. Broadcast and ticketing pressure is real too, and the honest way to describe elite heat management is as a much better-resourced version of the same problem. The Boxing Day Test at the MCG and the January Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground both sit squarely in the hottest fortnight of the Australian year, and both have been played through days in the high thirties.

• 4Weather inputs feeding the index
• 4Risk bands with defined actions
• 10Index reading that stops play
• 30Minutes of improvement before resuming
• 18Age below which the pathway tool applies

Structural counts drawn from Cricket Australia's published weather guidance, not measurements of temperature or of matches abandoned. Each figure describes how the policy is built rather than how often it is triggered.

Day-night cricket and the timing workaround

The simplest heat intervention is not an index at all. It is a start time.

Sun exposure is one of the four HSRI inputs, and "night" is one of its four settings, which means an identical air temperature produces a materially lower index after dark. That is why so much Australian cricket has migrated to evenings: the Big Bash League is played almost entirely at night, and pink-ball day-night Test cricket exists in part because the second half of an Australian summer day is a far more comfortable place to play than the first.

Community cricket has been slower to move because grounds without lights cannot. But associations increasingly shift junior fixtures to early morning starts in the hottest weeks, and midweek Twenty20 competitions run under whatever lights a club can access. Moving a match three hours is often more effective than any amount of drinks-break management, and it costs nothing.

Smoke and air quality, not just heat

The summer of 2019 and 2020 added a hazard the heat index does not see. Bushfire smoke blanketed eastern Australia through December and January, and cricket was disrupted at every level, including a Big Bash fixture in Canberra called off for air quality rather than temperature. Grade competitions across New South Wales and Victoria lost days to smoke that would otherwise have been perfectly playable on temperature alone.

Air quality is now a routine part of the morning check for many associations, using state environment agency air quality indices rather than the Bureau of Meteorology. It is worth stressing that the two hazards are independent. A cool, still, smoke-filled day will return a low HSRI and be entirely unsuitable for cricket. If your association's heat policy does not mention air quality, that is a gap rather than a reassurance.

Heat policy and the crowd

Cricket Australia's heat policy covers participants. Spectators are covered by each venue's conditions of entry and by the venue operator's own hot-weather planning, which is a different document with different rules.

In practice the major Australian venues do broadly similar things on hot days: free drinking water refill points inside the gates, permission to bring in an empty or sealed water bottle, shaded concourses opened up, and messaging on the big screen. The specifics genuinely differ by ground and by event, including whether a sealed bottle is allowed at all and what size, so the only reliable answer is the conditions of entry for the venue and fixture you are attending. The Australian cricket grounds guide covers the individual venues, and the practical page on how to watch cricket in Australia covers the ticketing side.

If you are sitting on an uncovered bank at Adelaide Oval or on the exposed side of the Gabba in January, the operative advice is the same as for players: hat, sunscreen reapplied hourly, more water than you expect to need, and a deliberate move into shade in the middle session rather than after you start feeling unwell.

Ground design, curators and what venues can control

Some heat mitigation is built rather than managed. Shade structures over spectator areas, covered players' race, trees on the boundary at community grounds, and access to a clubroom with air conditioning all change the practical risk without touching the index.

Curators have a role too, though a limited one. Pitch and outfield preparation in extreme heat is its own problem: an outfield that has been baked hard is faster and less forgiving on a diving fielder, and water restrictions in a dry summer constrain what a curator can do about it. Grounds staff at major venues manage surface temperature actively during hot fixtures, which is one more thing a volunteer curator at a suburban ground cannot replicate.

For clubs, the highest-value investments are unglamorous: a shade marquee that goes up in ten minutes, two large eskies, a supply of ice, a hose with a working tap near the ground, and a first-aid kit with instant cold packs that is actually in date.

What a club should have in place before the first hot Saturday

A short checklist, because the failure mode is almost always improvisation on the day:

• Know your association's published threshold, its nominated weather station, and its decision deadline, and make sure every team manager knows where the decision gets posted.
• Nominate one person per team responsible for taking the index reading and raising it with the umpires.
• Carry ice, eskies, wet towels and a shade structure to every away fixture, not just home games.
• Brief juniors' parents on the pathway tool and on what a cancellation looks like, before the first 38-degree forecast rather than during it.
• Check that the first-aid kit contains cold packs and that at least one person present knows the heat stroke response.
• Have a plan for what happens to players who are dropped off at a ground by a parent who then leaves, when a match is abandoned mid-afternoon.

None of that requires money. Most of it requires one person to have thought about it in October.

How the policy sits alongside Sports Medicine Australia's guidelines

Sports Medicine Australia publishes a general extreme heat risk and response framework used across Australian sport, updated in recent years with heat stress risk curves developed for the 40 most popular Australian sports, factoring in each sport's typical metabolic rate, clothing and self-generated wind speed. It comes with a free cross-platform web tool that gives location-specific, hour-by-hour risk classification, a hierarchy of risk-reduction strategies, and a seven-day forecast.

Cricket Australia's index and the Sports Medicine Australia framework are not competitors. The cricket tool is the one written into cricket's own policy documents and is the one an umpire applies. The Sports Medicine Australia tool is more useful for planning, because it forecasts a week ahead rather than describing the current hour, which is exactly what an association needs on a Wednesday when deciding whether to move a Saturday junior carnival.

The broader trend both reflect is that Australian sport has moved from thresholds to graded risk with graded responses, and from cancellation as the only lever to a hierarchy that starts with cooling and rest and ends with cancellation. That is a better fit for a country where the alternative is not playing cricket for three months.

What to re-check before you rely on any of this

Three things change between seasons and none of them is under Cricket Australia's control.

Your association's temperature cut-offs and morning deadline can be revised at any AGM, and the nominated Bureau of Meteorology station can change if a station closes. The index tool itself is periodically updated as the underlying research improves, and the version numbers on Cricket Australia's policy documents move. And your own competition may add an air quality rule, a start-time shift or a junior-specific provision that does not appear anywhere in the national document.

Read your association's current heat policy page in September, not in January. That is the whole of the practical advice.

Related reading

For the wider structure this policy sits inside, see cricket in Australia and the guide to Cricket Australia's structure. If you are the person who will be applying the index at the ground, the companion pages on becoming a cricket umpire in Australia and cricket coaching accreditation in Australia cover the training that includes weather and participant safety. The Big Bash format guide explains why so much of the game is now played at night, and the Australia hub links the rest of the section.