ICC Academy Dubai: Grounds, Nets and Programmes

Most cricket grounds are built for spectators. The ICC Academy in Dubai Sports City was built for players, and it shows: two full-size ovals with almost no permanent seating, an outdoor practice square with more turf pitches than most Test grounds have in total, and an indoor centre attached to a gym. It sits a short walk from the ICC's own headquarters and from the Dubai International Stadium, which means an international side arriving in the Emirates can train, play warm-up matches and then walk to the tournament venue.

It is also, quietly, a working international ground. Ovals accredited for one-day and Twenty20 internationals have staged World Cup Qualifier matches, Under-19 World Cup fixtures, women's internationals and a stack of UAE home games in front of a few dozen people. A ground built as a practice facility has ended up in the record books.

And it is a school. The Academy runs junior and adult coaching programmes across the Emirates and the wider Gulf, and it is where a large share of the region's accredited coaches, umpires and groundsmen sit their courses. Those three functions — training base, match venue, education centre — are what the place actually is, and they are worth taking in turn.

The 2010 opening, and who set it up

The Academy was announced years before it opened. The original target was 2008; construction and the wider slowdown in Dubai pushed the launch to 2010, when the facility opened as the ICC Global Cricket Academy with the ICC's president Sharad Pawar, vice-president Alan Isaac and chief executive Haroon Lorgat present.

Rod Marsh, the former Australia wicketkeeper who had previously run the academies in Adelaide and Loughborough, was appointed to direct it. Mudassar Nazar and Dayle Hadlee joined the coaching staff — a Pakistani batting all-rounder and a New Zealand seamer, which was a deliberate signal about who the place was meant to serve. The stated purpose was not to produce Emirati internationals but to be a shared centre of excellence for the whole game, including its administrators, umpires and curators.

That framing matters, because it explains why the site was overbuilt relative to local demand. The Emirates in 2010 had a large expatriate club scene and a national side that had not reached a World Cup since 1996. The Academy was designed around the ICC's presence in Dubai rather than around the UAE's playing population, and the practice square is the clearest evidence of it.

Two ovals, and what is under them

There are two floodlit full-size ovals, both accredited for one-day and Twenty20 international cricket. Each square carries both Asian and Australian turf wickets, so a visiting side can practise and play on the surface type it is about to face rather than on whatever the local soil produces.

The seating is minimal. There is an air-conditioned pavilion with several changing rooms, which is a genuine requirement in Dubai and not a luxury, but no large stands. That is a design decision, not an omission: a facility built to run four sessions a day for touring squads has no use for twenty thousand seats, and the main stadium next door covers the crowd. Where the Academy fits among the other Emirati venues is set out in the UAE cricket grounds guide.

The practice square, built from four countries' soils

The outdoor practice area is the part of the Academy that has no real equivalent anywhere else. It runs to something in the region of three dozen floodlit practice pitches, and they are deliberately not uniform. The mix includes Australian and Pakistani soil profiles, English clay, synthetic surfaces and at least one hybrid pitch prepared to favour spin.

The reasoning is straightforward. A side flying to Dubai before a tour of England wants seam movement and low bounce; a side preparing for Australia wants pace and carry; a side preparing for a subcontinental series wants a surface that grips by the second day. Building the four types side by side means the preparation can be selected rather than improvised, which is not possible at a single-square ground.

There is also a six-lane floodlit cricket cage with retractable netting, used for the high-volume throwdown and bowling-machine work that would otherwise chew up the turf.

Indoors, and the strength work

The indoor centre holds six practice pitches, arranged as a pair of spin-friendly nets, a pair prepared for pace, and two batting wickets with full-length run-ups. That last detail is the one that separates a serious indoor school from a school hall with a net in it: a bowler who cannot run in properly is not training.

The centre also carries video analysis, batting simulation and bowling and fielding machines, and it adjoins the Academy's gym, which is set up for cricket-specific conditioning and physical testing rather than as a general fitness room. In practice the indoor centre is what keeps the site usable through the Gulf summer, when outdoor cricket in the middle of the day is not sensible.

The international cricket played here

The ovals have a real match record, most of it involving Associate sides and much of it involving the UAE at home.

First	Date	Match
Men's T20 international	13 March 2012	Kenya v Scotland
Men's ODI	11 March 2013	Canada v Kenya
Women's ODI	9 February 2019	Pakistan v West Indies
Women's T20 international	22 November 2021	UAE v Malaysia

The ground was one of the venues for the 2014 Under-19 Cricket World Cup, which the UAE hosted, and it was used again for the 2019 men's T20 World Cup Qualifier staged in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. It also took warm-up matches ahead of the 2021 men's T20 World Cup, which is exactly the role the site was designed for.

The individual performance most often cited here is Muhammad Waseem's 107 not out from 62 balls against Ireland on 10 October 2021, in a T20 international the UAE won by seven wickets. Waseem's arrival is the pivot point in the recent history of the national side, traced in the UAE national team history.

One oddity belongs to the ground as well: a 2014 one-day international between Ireland and Scotland was abandoned here, the first ODI played in the Emirates to finish without a result. In a country where rain is rare enough to be news, that took some doing.

Courses: coaches, umpires and curators

The education side is the least visible part of the Academy and arguably the most consequential for cricket in the Gulf. It runs accredited coach education, umpire accreditation and turf management courses and workshops, with recognition that carries beyond the Emirates.

Turf management is the one worth pausing on. Producing a cricket pitch in a desert climate is a specialist problem — irrigation, salinity, grass selection, and heat that will kill a square that is watered on a British schedule. A region that wants its own grounds needs its own curators, and until there was somewhere to train them the Emirates imported that expertise. The same logic applies to umpires: an Associate nation cannot staff a domestic competition without accredited officials, and the pathway from club umpire to panel official runs through courses like these. The wider structure that sits above all of it is described in the guide to the Emirates Cricket Board.

Junior and adult programmes

For residents, the Academy is most likely to be encountered as a coaching provider. The programme structure runs by age:

• Cricket Cubs for the youngest children, from around four.
• Warriors squads for boys and girls through the school ages up to eighteen, sponsored and run in graded groups.
• Senior Warriors for adults from eighteen upwards, which is unusual — most cricket academies stop at youth level.
• Satellite coaching delivered into schools across the Emirates and the wider Gulf, rather than requiring every child to travel to Dubai Sports City.
• Holiday camps, one-to-one sessions and overseas tours on top of the term-time programmes.

The satellite element is the significant one for anyone assessing whether the Academy actually widens participation. A single site in Dubai Sports City serves the families who can drive there; school-based delivery reaches children who cannot. How that connects to competitive cricket is covered in the UAE school cricket pathway, and the adult club route is in the guide to club cricket in Dubai.

Visiting, booking and what to expect

A few practical notes for anyone planning to use or watch cricket at the site.

The Academy is in Dubai Sports City alongside the main stadium, inland from the coast, and is reached by car or taxi rather than by Metro. Nets, ovals and the indoor centre are bookable, and the site is used commercially for corporate and domestic tournaments as well as for elite training — so availability during a busy international window is limited.

If you are going to watch a match rather than to train, expect a genuinely small ground experience: no ticketing apparatus for most fixtures, a handful of spectators, and cricket of a standard far higher than the setting suggests. UAE home internationals and Associate qualifying matches played here are among the easiest high-level cricket in the world to walk up to. The route from that level upwards is described in the Associate cricket pathway, and the qualifying tournaments those matches feed into are covered in the UAE World Cup Qualifier history.

For the wider picture of how a country with no first-class competition of its own ended up with a facility like this, start at the cricket in the UAE hub. The parallel development story on the women's side is in UAE women's cricket development.

Sources and method

Facility descriptions here follow the ICC Academy's own published information about its grounds, practice areas, indoor centre and programme structure, together with ICC news releases from the 2010 opening. Match firsts and the individual scores quoted are taken from published scorecards and ground records for the venue.

Two things are deliberately left vague. Pitch counts on the practice square are reported by different sources as slightly different totals, so this page describes the mix of surface types rather than asserting an exact number. Programme names and age bands change from season to season with sponsorship and demand, so the list above describes the shape of the offering rather than a current timetable. Anyone booking should check directly.