Cricket and time zones

Matches are scheduled for the ground's local day, which can be the middle of the night where you are. The calendar shows every time in the zone you choose.

Why matches land at odd hours

Grounds schedule play for their own daylight and their own local audience, and those can be a long way from yours. A Test that starts at 10:00 in Sydney during the Australian summer begins at 23:00 the evening before in London. A day-night match in the Caribbean can finish after midnight in Europe, and an evening T20 in India is an afternoon game in the UK.

Every time, in your zone

The fixtures behind this site record each match's start and finish as an exact moment in time, not as a local clock reading. Your browser then shows that moment in the zone you have chosen, and a match sits on the calendar day it starts in that zone. That is why a match can appear a day earlier or later than the date printed on a ticket: both are right, for different places.

The zone is set with the select in the filters. It starts on Auto, which is the zone your browser reports, and the option shows the city and the current offset, such as "Auto · Berlin (GMT+2)" if you are in Germany in summer. Below it is a short list of zones for the places cricket is played, ordered by their offset from UTC, from Hawaii to New Zealand. Pick one and the whole calendar redraws in that zone. It is a handy trick for checking a match's local start time: choose the zone of the ground, read the time, then switch back to Auto.

Reading the labels

The date bar says which zone the times are in, for example "Times in Europe/London (BST)". A match's details card repeats the zone after its time, using the short name your browser gives it, such as BST, GMT, CEST or CET. Where the browser has no short name for a zone it shows the offset instead, so India appears as GMT+5:30.

Multi-day matches

A Test or first-class match is scheduled as the same hours each day, so its details card gives one line for the lot, something like "10:00-17:00 BST (+30 mins) daily". The dates it covers are on the line above. The "+30 mins" is there because the playing conditions for multi-day cricket allow the umpires to extend a day's play, usually by up to half an hour, to make up lost overs, so the scheduled close is not always the real one. On the grid the same half hour is shown as a fade at the end of each day's bar. When the listed times give no close of play, the card just says when play starts, as in "from 10:00 BST daily".

A one-day match has no such line: the card shows its start and finish, and the bar ends at the listed finish.

Daylight saving

Clocks change on different dates in different countries, and the southern hemisphere moves the opposite way to the northern. Europe's summer time starts at the end of March and ends at the end of October; much of North America changes on other weekends; south-eastern Australia and New Zealand move their clocks forward in spring, around September or October, and back again around April. India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh do not change their clocks at all, and nor do Queensland or Western Australia.

The result is that the gap between two cricket countries moves during the year. London is nine hours behind Sydney in the northern summer, eleven hours behind in the northern winter, and ten hours behind for a few weeks in between. The calendar works out each match with the rules that apply on its own date, which is why the card can say BST for a match in September and GMT for one in November in the same zone.