How the ICC academy bounced back from a desert flood

Seated in the balcony overseeing the ICC Academy Oval 1, where Sri Lanka and Bangladesh were involved in their first official warm-up game of the Women's T20 World Cup 2024, Anoop Eapen made a passing mention of the ongoing unseasonal rain in Sharjah. "Don't mention that word!" came the reply from his pitch curator, reflecting the mental scars that are still to heal from the events of April.

In this instance, the rain gods descended south to Dubai, and so Anoop, the operations and facilities manager at the ICC Academy, mobilised his manpower right away. As it turned out, a couple of teams' training sessions were called off, and the two warm-up matches that were on the go faced minor hold-ups during a 20-minute spell of rain, but it was nothing in comparison to the havoc wreaked on 16 April 2024.

On that day, Anoop was keeping an eye on the 13-acre facility through the CCTV feeds in his home. Weather advisories had told UAE nationals and tourists not to step outside in view of the impending storm. The rainfall that began late on Monday 15 April, was expected to intensify the following morning, and it did. What seemed like a very elaborate joke at first was quickly turning into a full-blown nightmare.

"The next thing I know, the CCTV feed just gets cut. That's when I knew something really bad was happening," says Anoop.

What the UAE witnessed over a 24-hour spell that spanned three days broke all records from 75 years of meteorological data-keeping. Over 1200 flights were cancelled, with some of the emirates reporting a downfall of over 10 inches, bringing flooding and water-logging. Among the worst-hit in Dubai was the ICC Academy.

"We'd called off all sessions at the academy for the set day (April 16) - there was to be no coaching programs, no bookings, no trainings, none of that stuff. And it was for that one day initially, because we didn't know better, people didn't know what the effect of this rain could be. In hindsight if we knew, we would have been better prepared maybe, but again, I mean, with the amount of water that came in, I don't think there was any possibility of being 'prepared.'"

The outdoor cameras overseeing the two Ovals gave Anoop the best glimpse of what was happening. With no sound for reference, his only indicator was the intensity with which the fabrics covering the sightscreens were flailing about. An academy staff member who stayed nearby made a valiant effort to get in, only to report back that there was water gushing in from everywhere.

"We weren't spared from any side," Anoop says, remembering the ordeal. "The floods completely messed up our server room. There was water in the indoors, water in the gym, water in the office, water at the reception, water in the cafe, water in the shop, the rehab centre was flooded. I told him: 'That's enough update, go home now.' Being far away, it was actually very painful to listen to. The facility that I've been part of for so long, and knowing that it's in absolute distress."

The day passed with Anoop trying not to overthink too much. The following day, blocked roads prevented him from getting anywhere close to the academy even if he tried to. Once the rains had receded, he could only make it as far as the signal 500m from the facility.

"We were completely in the dark those four days. It was absolutely gut-wrenching because you show up, you can see the facility from a distance, but you just can't do anything."

It took four days to finally get in and yet the water hadn't fully drained. The Dubai government came to the rescue and helped pump it out on April 20. From that perspective, the academy emerged relatively quickly. Nobody knows exactly how high the water-logging was at its peak - the estimates were drawn purely based on the damage left in the wooden structures and wall paints. But of course, then there were bigger damages to take stock of.

"This place was pulled back to bare concrete. All of this," Anoop recalls with a sigh. "The whole carpeting had started bubbling, and in most places it had just come right off. It wasn't a neat sight."

Pointing around the indoor fielding arena, he adds: "There's these little granules among the synthetic grass flooring for cushioning your fall, and all of those granules had come out. As a matter of fact, the football centre adjoining the cricket oval [has] pretty much the same thing, and the entire area was covered beige.

"Once we stepped outside, there was a lot of contamination in our grass and in our ovals and in our nets."

Frequently used by many associate as well as full-member nations for training camps, the ICC academy prides itself on being the only facility worldwide to offer subcontinental, English and Australian practice turfs under one roof. On top of which there's a six-lane indoor as well as a six-lane outdoor cage with synthetic nets.

The two ICC-approved floodlit ovals have 10 surfaces each - five made from different soils from Pakistan and the remaining five from that of Australia. Over in the nets, there's four of English soil, a couple of hybrid ones, and 24 nets made up of Pakistani soil and the Australian soil, within which there's the Gabba and the WACA clay, to cater to a vast variety of pitch simulation requests.

All of that laid bare, and contaminated.

"To begin with, these grounds are saturated with water - I mean, we're trying to grow this in the middle of a desert, right? It's already saturated with water. And on top of that, you add the flood. There's nowhere for the water to go. Even the soil was like, 'Okay, what's going on? I'm full, guys.'

"In the nets there was a good 3-5 millimetres that we had to take off and redo. The grass, the pitch, the soil - it needed to come off. The pitches had to be redone basically because everywhere the top layer had to be sort of scraped off - that's the amount of silt that had settled on it, which basically kills the grass.

"Even in terms of contamination, we just don't know what all came onto the field with the floods, and we can't have kids or international teams training on that, right? We had to change the whole thing out. To do all of this and to grow the grass back again you need a few months."

The insurance companies came down and multi-million-dollar damage was assessed. "It was massive. I'm not going to quote the numbers... because it can't be quantified in numbers. I mean, there were a whole bunch of other things besides the actual value of the property, you know?"

With the support of a resilient team, a proper plan was put in place for the academy to get back on its feet.

"It had to be done pretty much in one go, and it was one hell of a project getting the whole thing turned around, I can say in hindsight. Because every little thing at the academy is extremely specialized, it's imported from different parts of the world. If you look at the turf nets, the clay needs to be imported from three different parts [of the world]. In indoors, the whole six-lane thing comes from Australia.

"Now if you look at shipment times, that's two months at least to ship this massive thing. We just sat here two months waiting for it to arrive. So, in terms of where we started, we had to start all of it at once. We had to press 'do' because we didn't have any time to waste.

"I'll be honest; when I come into work every day, I love just taking some time out on that terrace there, looking out. It's very calming and relaxing. But during those two months, every time I walked in, it was like a constant reminder of April 16: 'We had the flood, we need to get back up.'"

Fortunately, the disaster had arrived near the end of the ICC Academy season, which is buzzing from September to April, meaning most of the outdoor activities were going to be shut for maintenance anyway. The summer training camps for age-groups were worst hit. With the exception of a few that were moved to the Dubai International Cricket Stadium as backup, the academy couldn't cater to their usual off-season workload.

"Then we sit and wait for all the items to arrive, and get it installed. And as it was, the outdoors were ready in the meanwhile, we were waiting on the indoors to get completed and that's when we found out the World Cup is coming!"

Owing to the political upheaval in Bangladesh - the original hosts of the T20 Women's World Cup 2024 - the ICC took an 11th hour call to relocate the 10-team event to the UAE.

"There's months that go into the planning of a World Cup, right," says Anoop. "For us, it was three weeks, if not shorter, to turn around this whole thing, and we've always been available for cricket at any point in time. Our team's pretty strong in terms of turning things around quickly, getting it up and running.

"We've hosted World Cups on short notice, and mind you that was during Covid. We had IPL here two consecutive years with a pretty short turnaround then. If you look at the experience amongst the team, and if you just leverage that, I feel any event can be turned around."

While it didn't stress the renovation timelines, Anoop's teams collaborated to ensure the academy bounced back to play a vital role in the event.

"The indoors, the changing rooms of the ovals, and the corridor leading up it literally came up a week or so before the women's teams first landed here. The teams were beginning to come in and we were still commissioning these corridors. The teams were going to extensively use the outdoor nets and the grounds, which we brought back up as our first priority."

The quick turnaround ensured there aren't many areas that visibly reflect the extent of the loss this sprawling facility bore barely months ago, but if you, like Anoop, have walked these corridors enough, the signs of the damage are unmissable.

The state-of-the-art gym that the Australian team had requested to use throughout their stay is the last thing due for a renovation, in December. With 10 extremely satisfied international sides using the facilities day in and day out, Anoop settled back into his daily routines in the knowledge that the signs of wear and tear will be confined to their phones. To photographs and videos that are too painful to scroll back to nonetheless.