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Club Statement: Somerset v Glamorgan

Somerset County Cricket Club would like to apologise to anyone who attended last night’s Vitality Blast fixture against Glamorgan whose experience was adversely affected by the occasional floodlight outages which occurred during the match.

The Cooper Associates County Ground is award-winning for its presentation of the Vitality Blast, and it is always disappointing when this experience is not optimised.

At this stage the precise reason for the failure remains unknown.  Regular visitors to the ground this year will know that we began experiencing occasional, unpredictable issues with the lights during our recent Rothesay County Championship fixture against Sussex. As a consequence, we commissioned experts to undertake a full range of exploratory tests to the lighting infrastructure and power supply. Significant time and effort have been spent on investigating the issue and no direct faults were identified. Additional measures have also been implemented within the distribution room in order to mitigate any potential issues which may have contributed to the fault.

Following these works, our recent Vitality Blast double-header against Hampshire Hawks and the Women’s International T20 were staged without disruption.

Prior to the Glamorgan match, all of our standard pre-game operational checks were completed, and no issues were identified with the floodlights or the related infrastructure

However, a problem clearly remains, and a deeper intervention will now be initiated to diagnose and rectify this problem as soon as possible. This will include working with our floodlight suppliers, Musco, and the mains power supplier, National Grid.

The process will be concluded in good time ahead of our next floodlit fixture which is scheduled for later this month.

We would like to take this opportunity to apologise to the Members, supporters and players from both teams, the match officials and broadcast partners for the disruption that this issue caused.

We would like to thank you for your patience and understanding in this regard and for bearing with us last night whilst the issue was resolved. Despite the disruption, the atmosphere at the Cooper Associates County Ground was, as always, exceptional and we thank you for your continued and vociferous support.