A $600,000 miracle took place at Eden Park this morning. Now only a few minor miracles will be needed to produce an outstanding space-age portable pitch for the first New Zealand-Pakistan Test at the park, starting on Thursday.

Today's mega-buck manoeuvre involved the taking out of the wintertime rugby plug in the middle of the field and the dropping in of the specially-prepared cricket pitch. The whole operation took about three hours, and with practice that time could be halved.

In brief terms the 25-metre strip of turf grown in a tray is straddled by a hefty cross-section framework, which weighs about 16 tons. This has motors at each end to provide the hydraulic power to lift the 30-tonne tray, and super-wide rubber wheels with a soft 24 psi pressure which do not damage the outfield.

A large machine (in this case a power shovel) pushes the frame-work and pitch to the hole prepared in the middle of the park, and the hydraulics lower the pitch into the hole - and today the fit was superbly snug.

Now for the other miracles. The pitch yesterday felt like a length of wet, heavily-grassed plasticine. Now Warwick Sisson and his groundstaff will need sunshine to dry out the soil, and a canny combination of cutting and mowing.

Sisson said the pitch would dry quickly under sunshine. It has been lightly rolled and he expected that the first bout of heavy rolling would remove half of the young, tender grass. Then all that would remain would be to judge the ideal mixture of rolling and mowing - plus some prayers to the weather gods.

The remaining miracle will be the restoration of the outfield after it had been scraped and gouged by the Blues-Crusaders Super 12 rugby match last night.

The grass and to-soil on the Eden Park outfield has been laid for seven years. The experts suggest major surgery will soon be needed to bring the outfield turf back to international sport standard.

However, Sisson's staff will only have a few days, and thus must try and work some cosmetic magic before Thursday.

But the expertise shown by the contractors, StrathAyr, and the park groundstaff over the last few months, worked a major miracle with the pitch, and repairing a lot of ugly divots should be child's play.

StrathAyr is a Tasmanian-born (by Bill Casimaty in the late 1960's) Melbourne-based company that started making turf, and now is stretching its cricket-pitch-laying and sportsground development round the world.

Off-park pitch preparation was started by John Mailey as part of the Kerry Packer cricket revolution in the 1977/78 summer, but one problem was the need for heavy cranes to lift and trundle the pitch-in-tray from the glasshouse to the middle of the park.

The StrathAyr lifting system, using wide soft tyres, has taken the technology a big jump forward, and has already been successfully tested in the indoor One-Day International series between Australia and South Africa at the new Colonial Stadium at Melbourne.

Casimaty has recently been lecturing on the pitch technology in England, and has attracted interest from the United States.

Footnote: The Eden Park launch was watched by 20-30 park officials and media this morning. Missing was a former Auckland Rugby Union chief executive (charity will leave him nameless) who some years ago said the day they dropped a portable pitch into the middle of Eden Park he would march, sans clothes, down Queen St.

© CricInfo