Cricket Witness No 5 - Whites on Green

127 to hammer the fastest century of the season. Rutherford took just 45 balls to reach 50 with Robert Croft and Steve Bastien in particular being punished severely. Rutherford went on to reach a chanceless century with four sixes and eleven fours before retiring hurt with hamstring injury.” 5 For a ground steeped in history, Swansea did lead the way as far as Glamorgan was concerned with floodlit cricket as six floodlit contests were staged at St. Helen’s as the Welsh county, like their counterparts in England, took its first tentative step on the road towards day-night games. The inaugural floodlit game took place on 3 August 1988 with the rugby ground’s floodlit pylons illuminating an all-weather pitch laid out on the rugby field, with Glamorgan meeting a star-studded Rest of the World XI as part of the Club’s centenary year celebrations. The venture was repeated on an annual basis for the next five years but the contests against the Rest of the World side, staged on the artificial surface and with tiny straight boundaries were something of a gimmick rather than being serious cricketing fare with rain, rather appropriately, washing out the final scheduled game on 13 July 1993. Given its superior capacity over the Sophia Gardens ground, St. Helen’s was the venue for most of Glamorgan’s quarter-final and semi-final contests in one-day games until the late 1990s. Indeed, it was at Swansea in August A view of the floodlit cricket on the rugby field at St. Helen’s. International cricket comes to Swansea