Melbourne, Jan.29 (ANI): Two cricketers from Australia have signed up to play a gruelling charity cricket match with a team of Barmy Brits on Mount Everest.
The two teams have been named Team Hillary and Team Tenzing will take on each other under the captainship of England captain Andrew Strauss and England vice-captain Alastair Cook in a bid to set a world record for playing the highest ever official sports match and raise 550,000 dollars for the Himalayan Trust and British children’’s charity Lord’’s Taverners.
According to news.com.au, Nick Toovey, originally from Gosford, and Dave Christie, from Melbourne, will slip into their cricket whites and padded gloves to slog it out on a wicket 5165 meters above sea level.
Theres a bit of tension between the two teams. Theres been a fair bit of rivalry so far, it will definitely be a competitive game up there. And there could be a bit of swiping between the Australians and Britons with the Twenty20 World Cup and The Ashes coming up, Toovey was quoted, as saying.
Were going to be up there for ANZAC day, so well have a proper ceremony, and we were joking that wed wake them all (the Brits) up at dawn and make them charge up the hill for revenge. I dont know how theyll take that, he added.
But altitude alone could bring the cricket tragics from both nations down to size. Theyll face air with only 65 per cent of the oxygen found at sea level. Players already know the ball will bounce higher in such extreme conditions, and a NASA scientist is researching how the cricket ball might swing in the thinner air.
The pitch for the match will be hauled up the mountain by a sherpa or yak.
Self-confessed “cricket obsessive” Richard Kirtely dreamed up the Everest Test idea during a trip to the base camp of the world’’s highest mountain in 2006.
He saw a group of fellow trekkers playing cricket on the Gorak Shep Plateau about a kilometer from base camp, and envisioned the perfect space to put a pitch.
Thirty playing spots have been filled in case players are struck down by acute mountain sickness, but only 11 will take the field for each team.
Two official umpires and four medics including Sydneys Breck Lord - will accompany the players as they climb to more than 5000m above sea level in 10 days.
A team of spectators dubbed the Trektatorsll join them. (ANI)