It's a way out: how Sydney's Test cricket rain curse halts play and leaves Australian cities in its wake | Cricket

EEven if it doesn't rain during the New Year's Test this year and the forecast a day before the first ball is promising, history suggests it would be safer to hold the match earlier in the cricket season. According to ABC statistician Ric Finlay, at least 26 full days of the Sydney Test have been rained out since the 1880s.

That is three times more lost days than in Melbourne, where more matches took place. And even a higher percentage than subtropical Brisbane, which was hit by storms during the third Test against India last month.

Even if the game in Sydney has not been affected, at least some rain has fallen on a third of the matchdays in SCG Tests. Sydney is one of the rainiest Australian capitals and January is one of the rainier months.

There are some caveats to this; just over half of the Test matches at the SCG have been played in January. The Sydney Test was not held consistently in the New Year until the early 1990s and has since been held in both October and November.

There were 23 Tests played in February (nine days rained out), and a few as recently as March (one day lost); these months are even wetter than January. Eight of the washouts took place in December, but these were all before 1955. Many of the washouts in Sydney were also before the rules of cricket. had changed to cover the pitches when it rains.

It also rains a lot in Sydney, even if it's not hard enough to write off a day of cricket. We looked at long-term climate data from the nearest weather station to each ground. Some rain fell on about a third of matchdays in Sydney over the past 140 years, second only to Hobart.

Not all of this rain will actually impact games. The historical records only tell us if it rained within a 24-hour period, and the rain may have hit the station and bypassed the ground.

But analysis of ESPN scorecards shows rain-related delays, stoppages, shifted breaks or early stumps on 31 separate days at the Sydney Test since the year 2000. Two of these Tests were played in October and only one of them was affected by rain and a late start due to rain's at night. There were just over 120 days of play in these tests. More Sydney Tests were affected by rain than not, and six of the seven draws took place in rain-affected matches.

We were unable to obtain match times or more detailed scorecards for matches prior to 2000. Despite having additional rainy days, Hobart has only lost one full day to rain during the 14 test matches held there.

One reason for all these delays is simply that Sydney is a rainy city. It has the highest average annual rainfall of any major proving ground in Australia.

Sydney averages more than 1200mm of rainfall annually. This is more than double the average of Adelaide and Melbourne and even more than subtropical Brisbane.

Dr. Andrew King, a climate scientist from the University of Melbourne, notes that this is at least partly due to the way different weather systems affect these cities. For Sydney, any form of easterly wind will generally bring showers and rain, King says.

But it's not just that Sydney is rainier; it also rains more in summer than in winter, and January is one of the wettest months.

Between summer and winter we have movements of these weather systems, King says. So in the summer we tend to see the kind of fronts that affect Melbourne and Adelaide moving a little further south. Melbourne is therefore usually a bit drier in summer than in winter.

While Sydney is exactly the other way around. Partly because Sydney owes much of its weather to thunderstorms and those thunderstorms are likely to be more intense in the summer.

Summers in Sydney are slightly wetter than winters. But it may not always feel that way, as more rain falls during thunderstorms and less during these long, wet days. It can't rain anymore. It could just be heavier rain.

King says 140 years may not be enough time to see clear trends for noisy phenomena like rain. Where cricket is most clearly affected by climate change is in extreme heat. But that doesn't mean we can't draw conclusions from 140 years of data.

One thing I've noticed is that you're more likely to have washout days in places like Brisbane and Sydney than in Melbourne or Adelaide. You are more likely to have days in the summer where it actually rains all day. says King.