At the start of last month, grass wickets at Tonga Park, Brooklands Park, the Oval and Sunnyvale had been closed after they were found to be in a sub-standard condition for senior cricket.
That resulted in the Dunedin Cricket Association and the Dunedin City Council scrambling to reschedule matches and find other grounds. The reason for shutting down the pitches was said to be sub-standard preparation by council contractor City Care. At the time, DCC acting group manager of parks and recreation Richard Saunders said City Care had failed to deliver suitable surfaces.
Another contractor, Delta, was brought in to fix the pitch problems and the council confirmed that almost all of the pitches were back to playing standard.
"All of the grounds are back in action apart from Sunnyvale. It will be about another week," DCC operations manager parks and recreation Jendi Paterson said.
"We have remediated [the pitches] and the fields are back in action."
Paterson praised Delta’s effort to turn around the state of the pitches.
"The contractors that picked them up have done an exceptional job and [DCC] staff have done a fantastic job of overseeing and working with Dunedin Cricket to get them back to a standard that they can be played on this weekend."
It is unclear what future role City Care will have in preparing Dunedin pitches.
In December the contractors received a four-month suspension from their contract with the council following the pitch problems.
The council said some steps had been taken to ensure the situation did not happen again, but would not elaborate on them.
"The priority was to get the fields back up and running for the cricket games and the next steps are working through to ensure it doesn’t happen again."
Two of Dunedin senior cricket’s senior matches will be played on remedied Tonga Park wickets.
Albion plays Carisbrook on Tonga Park 1 and Green Island takes on Taieri on Tonga Park 2 tomorrow.
Kaikorai plays Northeast Valley at the unaffected Bishops court ground.
