BOIDC games in Bathurst cancelled due to poor air quality

As president of the Bathurst District Cricket Association, Graham and his fellow officials were forced to cancel all play in the city on Saturday morning due to poor air quality.

Due to the ongoing bushfires around the state, the NSW Government's Air Quality Index rated Bathurst's air on Saturday morning at 905, placing it well above the minimum hazardous rating of 200.

BDCA officials made an initial review at 8.30am and at that stage, made the decision to push all starting times back to 1.30pm delay a call on a possible cancellation as they continued to monitor air quality.

But with no improvement, a decision was made just after 10am to cancel all matches in Bathurst.

"It's always a tough decision to call cricket off whether it's rain, sunshine, heat, smoke, but the association took it's time to make the right call," Graham said.

"We could've called it off last night and not waited to wait to see if today was clear, but if we called it off then you have the backlash from people and players that don't understand the process we go though.

"Regardless of what people say, player safety is paramount, not just in out sport, but any sport."

Aside from the McDonald's Country Cricket NSW Colts Championship fixtures in Bathurst during the week which were cancelled, Graham said he had never previously seen play called off due to poor air quality.

But he said that the decision reflects how seriously governing bodies now take player welfare.

"Country colts I guess was the benchmark, they called games off during the week when the smoke probably wasn't this bad. We had to err on the the side of caution and we're better off calling the games off than having people up in hospital for what we call a game of cricket," he said.

"I haven't seen it called off because of smoke, a few seasons ago we called it off due to heat.

"I've played a lot of cricket in Queensland, back 20-25 years ago, where you just played. There was no heat rule, there was no smoke rule, you just used to play cricket. That's just old school people ... but duty of care, insurances that now come into play, that's all we can do now, play by caution, play by the directives set down by Cricket NSW.

"It's why we took our time, we did say we were going to make a call at 8.30am, but we did have people saying the wind was going to pick up, the smoke was going to go.

"But you can't make a call based on what you think will happen, you can only make a call on what's happening now and at the moment our air quality is just not good enough to play."

The BDCA matches that were called off on Saturday were one-day fixtures. Graham said in terms of points allocated, they will be treated the same as washed-out matches.

As for the two Bathurst-Orange Inter-District Cricket Association matches being played in the city - both of which were set to be resumption of two-day fixtures - they've both been deemed draws, with the four sides involved claiming one point each as per the playing conditions.

The cancellation of all Bathurst matches follows on from Friday night's Royal Hotel Cup Twenty20 match between Bathurst City and Lithgow being postponed.

Games in Dubbo were also called off due to due to severe heat, that decision being made on Friday afternoon given the mercury was expected to hit 46 degrees on Saturday.