Adelaide Day-Night Test: Ground, Pitch, History

Every Adelaide Oval Test used to start at half past ten in the morning and finish in the late afternoon, and the last hour of play was watched by people squinting into a low sun over the Torrens. For most of the decade after November 2015 it started in the early afternoon instead, and the last hour was played under six light towers with a pink ball that had already gone twenty overs old. Adelaide did not invent the idea of Test cricket after dark. It was simply the ground that agreed to go first, and then kept the fixture long enough for the experiment to stop being one.

The Test itself is much older than the format. Adelaide Oval has staged Tests since the 1880s and for most of the twentieth century held the second or third match of an Australian summer, a fixture with a reputation for being played on the flattest surface in the country in front of the most patient crowd. What the pink ball did was hand a mid-season Test a distinct identity, and South Australian cricket has spent a decade defending it.

In the 2025-26 Ashes that identity moved. Brisbane took the pink-ball Test, Adelaide reverted to a daytime start, and the ground that had hosted eight day-night Tests without ever losing one found itself with a conventional fixture again.

Getting the ground ready for a rebuilt game

The Adelaide that hosted the first day-night Test was three seasons out of a redevelopment. The project finished in March 2014, took the seating capacity from around thirty-four thousand to roughly fifty-three and a half thousand, and opened a nineteen-thousand-seat stand on the eastern side. It was done to make the ground viable for Australian rules football as well as cricket, which is why the outfield was reshaped and why the square was changed.

What the rebuild deliberately left alone is the northern end. The mound survived, complete with the Moreton Bay figs and the Edwardian scoreboard behind it, which is still operated by hand and is one of the two or three most photographed objects in Australian sport. Sitting on that grass with the cathedral spires behind you and a Test going on in front of you is the single reason most people give for preferring Adelaide to the other Australian venues. The wider comparison is in the guide to Australian cricket grounds.

The drop-in square, and what changes after dark

Adelaide moved to drop-in pitches around 2013, grown away from the ground and lifted into place. That single change did more to alter the venue's reputation than the pink ball did. The old Adelaide square was a batting surface with a slow second-day character and enough for a leg-spinner on the fourth afternoon. The drop-in versions have generally offered more consistent bounce and rather more for seam bowling, and the curating team under Damian Hough has become the most-consulted group of ground staff in the game, in part because Adelaide's experience with pink-ball preparation is unmatched.

Under lights the surface matters less than the ball and the air. A pink Kookaburra is coated differently from a red one to stay visible, the coating keeps the seam proud for longer, and the twilight hour — roughly the transition from natural light to floodlight — is when batting is hardest. Bowlers report that the ball skids more than it swings once the lights take over; batters report losing the ball against a dark background rather than against the sky. The mechanics of all of this, and the disagreement about how much of it is real, are set out in the guide to pink-ball cricket.

The practical consequence for Adelaide is that first-innings runs on day one, scored in daylight, have generally been worth more than they look, and that a side bowling in the last session of a day has an advantage it does not have in a red-ball Test.

27 November 2015

The first day-night Test began with Mitchell Starc bowling to Martin Guptill in the early afternoon, and it was over inside three days.

New Zealand made 202 and 208. Australia made 224 and then had to chase 187, which on any ordinary Adelaide surface would have been a formality and was not. Trent Boult took five for 60 in that innings and Australia lost seven wickets getting there, Shaun Marsh top-scoring with 49 and Peter Siddle eventually pushing the winning runs past point at a quarter to nine at night. Josh Hazlewood's six for 70 in the second innings was the bowling performance of the match, and Peter Nevill's 66 in the first was the innings that kept Australia in it.

Forty-seven thousand people came on the first day and more than a hundred and twenty thousand across the three, which for a match that finished early was the number that settled the argument inside Cricket Australia. The format had produced a close finish, a full house and a genuine spectacle, and the counter-argument that it was a gimmick lost most of its force in one weekend.

Every day-night Test the ground has staged

Adelaide hosted a pink-ball Test in most summers from 2015-16 to 2024-25, eight in total, and Australia won every one of them.

Summer	Opponent	Result	The performance people remember
2015-16	New Zealand	Australia by 3 wickets	Hazlewood 6-70; Siddle's winning runs at 8.46pm
2016-17	South Africa	Australia by 7 wickets	Usman Khawaja 145; hundreds for Faf du Plessis and Stephen Cook
2017-18	England	Australia by 120 runs	Shaun Marsh 126; James Anderson 5-43; Starc 5-88
2019-20	Pakistan	Australia by an innings	David Warner 335 not out; Marnus Labuschagne 162; Starc 6-66
2020-21	India	Australia by 8 wickets	India 36 in the second innings
2021-22	England	Australia won	The second win of a 4-0 Ashes summer
2022-23	West Indies	Australia won	Australia declared on 511 for 7
2024-25	India	Australia by 10 wickets	Travis Head 140; Starc 6-48; Pat Cummins five in the second innings

Warner's innings against Pakistan in November 2019 remains the highest score made in a day-night Test. He batted for 418 balls, put on 361 with Labuschagne, and was denied a run at the world record when Tim Paine declared at 589 for 3 before the dinner break — a decision argued over for weeks afterwards and defended on the grounds that Australia wanted three sessions with a new pink ball rather than a bigger number.

The 2017-18 match was the first Ashes Test played under lights, and it produced the tidiest illustration of the format's logic: Anderson's five for 43 was taken with a ball behaving in a way an English seamer recognised, in a country where he had rarely had that help.

The night India were bowled out for 36

The single most extraordinary session in the ground's modern history came in December 2020. India, having led on the first innings, were 36 all out in 21.2 overs on the third morning, with Hazlewood taking five for 8 and Cummins four for 21, and not one Indian batter reaching double figures. Mohammed Shami was struck on the arm and could not continue, so the innings closed on nine wickets down. Australia knocked off 90 for the loss of two.

It was India's lowest total in Test cricket, and it happened on a surface that had not looked dangerous for two days. That is the case for the pink ball at its most persuasive and its most uncomfortable: a good attack with a hard ball and a helpful hour can produce something no red-ball Test would allow. India recovered to win the series anyway, which is the part the scoreline in the Border-Gavaskar Trophy in Australia records and the collapse does not.

Four years later, on the same ground and in the same format, Travis Head made 140 off 141 balls for the state side he plays for and Starc took a career-best six for 48. Australia won by ten wickets inside three days. Head's relationship with the venue is the closest thing modern Australian cricket has to a home-town narrative, and it is not a coincidence that his best red-ball years have coincided with South Australia's revival, covered in the guide to the six state cricket teams.

Losing the fixture

Of the two dozen or so men's day-night Tests played anywhere, more than half have been in Australia, and Adelaide accounts for most of those. None of them has been drawn. They run shorter than red-ball Tests — a little over 260 overs on average against roughly 300 — which is a genuine finding rather than a marketing line, and it cuts both ways: a decisive result is good television and a four-day Test is a lost day of gate receipts.

For the 2025-26 Ashes, Cricket Australia gave the pink-ball Test to the Gabba, scheduling it in early December as the second match of the series, with Brisbane holding the pre-Christmas slot under a multi-year arrangement. Adelaide got the third Test, in the middle of December, starting in the morning. South Australian officials made their unhappiness clear, on the reasonable ground that the state had carried the format when nobody else wanted it.

Whether the change is permanent is not settled. What it demonstrates is that the day-night Test has stopped being an Adelaide project and become a scheduling tool, which was always the intended end point even if South Australia did not expect to be the one that paid for it.

Going to a Test at Adelaide Oval

The ground sits across the Torrens from the city centre, about a fifteen-minute walk from the middle of Adelaide over the footbridge, which is the most pleasant approach to any Test ground in the country. Trams and trains run to North Terrace and Adelaide station.

A few practical notes for anyone planning it:

• General admission on the northern mound is the cheapest ticket and the best value; it fills early on a Saturday.
• Day-night starts, where they happen, mean the busiest hour on public transport is after eleven at night. Daytime Tests finish around six.
• The ground runs tours that include the heritage scoreboard and the players' areas outside match days.
• The Adelaide Test has traditionally been a mid-December fixture, so it is the one Australian Test that does not clash with Christmas or New Year travel.

For broadcast arrangements and streaming, see how to watch cricket in Australia. The other two fixtures in the traditional summer block are the Boxing Day Test at the MCG and the New Year Test at the SCG, and the rest of the Australian game is indexed on the cricket in Australia hub. Career records for the players named above are in the player index.

Sources and method

This page rests on Cricket Australia's published fixtures and schedule announcements, Adelaide Oval and South Australian Cricket Association material on the redevelopment and the drop-in square, official scorecards and match reports for each day-night Test played at the ground, and contemporary reporting of the 2015 debut and the 2025-26 Ashes scheduling decision. Capacity is given as the figure quoted for the completed redevelopment; configurations vary by event. Where a figure moves — the number of day-night Tests played worldwide, average overs per match — it is described in general terms. Nothing here is computed from our own datasets; the page is descriptive.