Australia might start to host "indoor Tests" by 2028 in a new stadium with a "transparent roof"

Cricket might finally get a stadium with a functional roof in Australia via a multi-purpose 23,000-seater venue being built in Hobard for the Tasmanian Devils, a new football team joining the Australian Football League (AFL) in 2028. The stadium is part of the Devils' deal with AFL. Like many other grounds in the country, they want it not just to be limited to hosting football games.

With the transparent roof, it's supposed to be able to entertain indoor red-ball cricket during the day as well as white-ball cricket under the floodlights in the evening.

"We want to get to red-ball [cricket], that's our focus," Macquarie Point Development Corporation CEO Anne Beach told SEN Tassie, as quoted by ESPNcricinfo. "The tricky thing is…we can't be accredited until it's built so what we need to do is keep working through the detail and design process with Cricket [Tasmania] and Cricket Australia and work with them to brief ICC to make sure they have all the information available."

"We are workshopping with them through detailed design so we are making sure we are factoring in everything they need, [so] they have a clear understanding of how it's coming together then hopefully that sign-off process is pretty smooth. But we do want to get that red-ball sign-off and that's critical I think to enable that full content to be in the stadium," Beach added.

This could be a major boost to the sport, which has suffered immensely due to rain. Roofing cricket stadiums have always been considered an arduous task because of the difficult logistics and high costs involved. Multi-purpose stadiums might be the way forward if countries like England and India can also join in.

Architectures of Australian stadium used Hawk-Eye to judge the ideal height

The construction company, Cox Architecture's CEO, Alistair Richardson told ESPNcricinfo that the roof will be 50 meters tall - a number zeroed upon after going through ball-tracking data to judge how high cricket balls are often hit.

"Cricket's biggest concern was the height of the roof...they cited concerns with Marvel Stadium [in Melbourne] where the ball could potentially hit the roof," Richardson told ESPNcricinfo.

"What we've done is we've worked through looking at Hawk-Eye and the ball-tracking technology, to actually assess the maximum height that anyone's hit a ball, which is quite interesting. Then, actually, [we've] pushed the roof to 50 metres, which cricket was really happy with, because there's no instance of anyone hitting a ball at 50 metres," he added.

Test cricket is yet to see an indoor game as other roofed stadiums like the Marvel Stadium have only hosted white-ball games. This venue might also be ideal for World Test Championship finals which can ill-afford to suffer from rains.