Modular Cricket Stadiums: How Pop-Up Grounds Work

A cricket square is normally the least portable object in sport. It is a strip of rolled clay that takes years to consolidate, acquires its character from a specific soil in a specific climate, and cannot be replaced without starting the process again. Grounds are described by their squares — the bounce at Perth, the low grip at Chepauk — precisely because those properties are the accumulated product of decades in one place.

Modular cricket contradicts all of that. It says a square can be grown somewhere convenient, driven to wherever the fixture is, dropped into a prepared bed, played on, lifted out and stored. Combine that with grandstands hired from the events industry and you get a stadium that exists for a fortnight, which is exactly what the United States built on Long Island in 2024 and what southern California is building in stages now.

This is a method rather than a place, and it is worth understanding on its own terms, because it is the reason American cricket has stadium-grade venues at all.

The idea started with a dispute, not a design brief

Drop-in pitches were not invented for convenience. They were invented because someone had been locked out.

When Kerry Packer set up World Series Cricket in Australia in the late 1970s, the established authorities refused him access to the traditional grounds. His organisation had matches, players and television contracts and no cricket squares to play on. The solution, developed by John Maley, then a curator at the WACA in Perth, was to grow pitches in trays elsewhere and install them in the stadiums that would take the fixtures. It worked well enough to survive the dispute that produced it.

Half a century on, the technique is standard in places where a cricket ground has to share its outfield with another code. Adelaide Oval, the MCG and Optus Stadium in Perth all use portable pitches; so do Eden Park in Auckland and the main stadium in Wellington. That background is set out in the account of the World Series Cricket history and the Kerry Packer era that produced it.

How a pitch is grown in a tray

The engineering is less exotic than it sounds and more demanding than it looks.

A pitch is built up inside a steel tray roughly the length of a cricket pitch, around three metres wide and only about 200 millimetres deep — the depth is the constraint that makes everything else difficult. Into it go native soil and clay, compacted in layers, with a couch or bermuda grass sward on top. The trays are usually grown under climate control rather than in the open, so the surface consolidates on a predictable schedule instead of at the weather's discretion.

Moving one requires heavy haulage: a purpose-built trailer, careful lifting to avoid cracking the clay, and blankets or covers to protect the grass in transit. At the destination the trays are lowered onto concrete beds set into the outfield, so the finished surface sits flush with the grass around it. Done properly, a batter cannot tell where the tray ends.

The catch is time. A conventional square has years to settle; a drop-in has whatever the schedule allows. When the World Cup square was delivered to New York in early May 2024, it had roughly three weeks before international cricket was played on it, and the consequences of that compression are described in detail in the Nassau County stadium legacy.

The American version, and where the trays came from

The United States has taken the method further than anyone, because it had further to go.

For the 2024 World Cup, ten trays were used on Long Island: six routed via Adelaide Oval and four built locally, planted with Tahoma bermudagrass, grown and prepared in Florida by a specialist turf contractor under the guidance of Adelaide Oval's head curator, with a Kentucky bluegrass outfield laid around them. The finished pitches travelled up the East Coast by road.

Then they travelled again. When the professional league needed a venue in northern California for its 2025 season, those same pitches were lifted from Eisenhower Park and hauled roughly 2,900 miles to the Oakland Coliseum, with the grounds contractor handling extraction and transport and the Adelaide Oval team overseeing the grow-in at the far end. After the fixtures they came out again and went into storage.

Stage	Where
Grown and prepared	Florida
First use	Eisenhower Park, New York, June 2024
Lifted and transported	Roughly 2,900 miles by road
Second use	Oakland Coliseum, June 2025
After that	Removed and stored for future fixtures

A square that has been grown in one state and played on in two others, thousands of miles apart, in successive summers, is something the sport has not seen before. It also means the competition owns its playing surfaces rather than renting them with a stadium, which changes the negotiation with any landlord.

The stands are hired from other sports

The second half of a modular stadium is the seating, and here cricket is a customer rather than an innovator.

There is an established international industry in demountable grandstands, built for events that need thirty thousand seats for four days and none for the rest of the year: golf majors, motor racing, tennis, festivals. The general admission seating at the 2024 World Cup ground on Long Island had previously been erected for the Formula 1 Las Vegas Grand Prix and for golf tournaments. On top of the frames went the commercial fit-out — suites, cabanas, clubs, decks — assembled from the same kit of parts.

This is why a 34,000-seat stadium could be delivered in a little over a hundred days. Nothing structural had to be invented or manufactured; it had to be scheduled, shipped and bolted together. The construction risk in a modular stadium is logistics, not engineering.

Pomona: modular as a permanent building method

The newest American application flips the purpose. Instead of using modular construction to make a stadium disappear, the ground at the Pomona fairgrounds in Los Angeles County uses it to let one grow.

The venue opened in mid-2026 at around five thousand seats, with a published plan to reach roughly twelve thousand during 2027 and about fifteen thousand for the 2028 Olympic Games. Because the stands are modular, each of those steps means adding units rather than commissioning a new structure, and the ground can host professional cricket throughout. That is a very different financial proposition from building fifteen thousand seats at the outset and hoping the crowds arrive, and it is the model most likely to be copied. The projects following it are surveyed in the guide to future cricket venues.

What the method genuinely fixes

Three things, and they are not small.

• Speed. A stadium in one winter rather than three years. Without that, the 2024 World Cup could not have gone to New York at all.
• Reach. A competition can put a fixture in a city it has no property in, because the pitch and the seats both travel.
• Risk. Capacity can follow demand upwards, and a venue that turns out not to work can be removed rather than maintained.

For a sport at American cricket's stage of development — real audience, unproven attendance, almost no owned infrastructure — those three advantages are close to decisive.

What it cannot fix

The limits are equally clear, and two of them are cricketing rather than financial.

A drop-in square does not develop character. Part of what makes an established ground interesting is that its surface has a known personality that players learn and commentators argue about; a tray that has spent nine months in storage arrives without one, and behaves according to how recently it was laid and how well it has settled rather than according to where it is. Uniform pitches are a plausible long-term consequence of the method, and that would be a loss.

Second, the compressed settling window is a real quality risk, as New York demonstrated. Nothing about the technique guarantees a good pitch; it guarantees a pitch.

Third, on cost, modular is cheap once and expensive repeatedly. Hiring thirty thousand seats every year for a decade costs more than building them. The method suits a tournament or a young league finding its markets, and stops making sense the moment a venue has reliable annual demand — at which point the sensible move is what happened in Texas, where a permanent ground was created by converting an existing stadium, as described in the guide to cricket in baseball stadiums and the Grand Prairie Stadium guide.

The low-tech end of the same idea

Not every flexible venue involves steel trays and a haulage contract, and it is worth registering how much of American cricket runs on cruder versions of the same principle.

Temporary seating is the commonest. The Texas ground has permanent capacity around seven thousand and was taken to roughly fifteen thousand with hired stands for the 2024 World Cup, then returned to its normal configuration. The Florida stadium achieves the same thing with grass berms around part of the perimeter: no structure at all, just a graded bank that can hold a large standing crowd when the fixture warrants it and is a park slope the rest of the year. Both are modular thinking without the modular invoice.

At the other end, the portable surface has a cheap cousin in artificial and matting strips. When the Long Island ground was stripped back after the World Cup, the drop-in square was replaced with an artificial pitch, which is the right decision for a public park: it needs no curator, tolerates continuous use in all weathers, and lets local clubs play on a properly levelled full-sized ground every weekend. The great majority of club and league cricket across the United States is played on exactly that kind of surface, laid over a levelled base in a municipal park.

The difference matters for player development. An artificial strip gives consistent bounce and no lateral deviation, which is fine for playing cricket and limited as preparation for a turning or seaming pitch. A country whose entire grassroots plays on synthetic surfaces and whose professionals play on freshly laid drop-ins is a country whose batters have rarely faced a genuinely difficult ball off the seam. That is a coaching problem rather than a construction one, but it starts with construction.

Where this is heading

The most likely future for American cricket is a mixture rather than a winner. A small number of permanent grounds with settled squares, one of them at Olympic scale; a stock of drop-in trays owned by the professional competition and moved to whichever large stadium a market justifies; and hired seating brought in whenever an event outgrows the permanent capacity of the ground hosting it.

That is an unromantic answer, and it is the one the economics point at. It also has a precedent that should reassure anyone worried about it: Australian cricket has played international matches on portable pitches for decades without the game there becoming worse. The technique is not the threat. Building nothing permanent at all would be. The rest of the American picture sits on the cricket in the USA hub, and the ground that first made international cricket possible in the country is covered in the history of cricket in Lauderhill.

Sources and method

The account of drop-in pitch origins follows published cricket histories of the World Series Cricket dispute and the curators involved. Tray dimensions, construction materials and transport methods are drawn from the published operational descriptions of Australian venues that use portable pitches. Details of the 2024 World Cup square, its preparation in Florida and its later move to California come from the ICC, the contractors involved and reporting of the transfer. Capacity figures and staged expansion plans for the Pomona ground are the announced targets of the parties building it. Dimensions and depths are given as approximations because they vary between suppliers. The evaluation of what the method fixes and fails to fix is editorial argument, not a computed result.