After the damp outfield caused the abandonment of the 5th match of the series they end up playing in oppressive heat in the 6th.Apparently it is 44 degrees in the shade so goodness knows how hot it is in the middle.

Matt Prior was sick and M.S. Dhoni was visibly struggling with the conditions towards the end of his innings.They have heat breaks at the Australian Open tennis when it is ridiculously hot and it makes you wonder whether it could be dangerous for players on both sides to be playing when it is so hot.

I hope we don't end up with anyone having to go to hospital to be rehydrated.

Angus Fraser said on radio that at the meetings he is involved with at the ICC they have mentioned about cricket being played in extreme heat and whether they should do anything about it.The flip side of this could be a side touring England in a cold miserable May so i guess they can't really do anything about it other than just let all players take as much liquid on as possible.

Aha ! You can wear more jumpers in the cold (perhaps the icc would allow a white wooly hat) but short of running round starkers (and risking sunburnt appendages) you cant really stop dehydrating unless you stop playing. If it was just a case of pasty-faced northerners wilting, I'd say tough, but as some of the indain team were wilting too, and they are used to the heat to a certain extent it must have been hot. Perhaps at this time of year in india when it is mega hot, if the stadium is so equipped, what about just day/night matches ? Or are we looking at matches won at hte toss of a coin ?

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I think most games during the day, in the first innings you suffer from 11am-1.30pm for the highest levels of sun rays. This means the team batting first get two and-a-half hours in the middle when the temperature is at it's potential highest. Whereas the second innings never actually hits the boundaries of 11am-2pm. So you would say batting second is probably the easier option in terms of potential temperature levels.

However your fieders still have to go out and run around, maybe not to the extent the batsmen do but they will still get a pretty high level of fatigue in that kind of heat.

I would say day/night games are a very good answer, the stadium has to have flood lights which really shouldn't be a major problem in this day-and-age. (Do a lot Indian stadiums not have flood lights?) If you were batting when the sun is /going down then certainly the players will suffer much less dehydration. Although they would still have to compete with the high humidity levels.

Playing in cold weather I think is fine, most of the time the players can stay warm because they are running around. Also we have underl-layer clothing like Skins which players can wear to keep themselves warm.

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Interesting point raised here, and I'd like to hear a medical opinion on it really. I can't help thinking that the medicos who are associated with the teams must have looked at this before, however, as it's really not a new issue. Dehydration is (I think) somewhere around 35-40% through respiration and perspiration, and specifically evaporation of the same. Running around obviously increases the respiration effect, but the perspiration effect can be controlled to a surprisingly large extent by proper clothing. Brits in hot places (tourists, I mean, not professional sportsmen) typically respond to the heat by stripping down as far as possible: they get sunburnt and dehydrated as a result. Look at the average Aussie in Queensland, however, and he will have a long sleeved shirt on and a vest, as well as long trousers in the middle of the day. There's a reason for it, of course. That doesn't stop him needing to take on a lot of water to replace what he loses - but he won't dehydrate anywhere near as fast as the under-dressed do. I don't underestimate the dangers of dehydration at all - no-one who's had even the mildest case of heatstroke will - but my guess is that there are enough professionals monitoring this to keep it under control for the cricketers. They might be drinking a couple of litres or more of fluid every hour and peeing nothing, but as long as they carry on doing it, they'll be OK, I'd expect: it's an amazing thing, the body of the mammal!

Now - is there a doctor in the house who can tell me the above is complete ********?

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I suppose I view this question on a simplistic platform. If both teams are playing in the conditions, then the game is fair and no extra precautions should be used (I believe they can all ready include extra drink breaks if need be).

So if it is hotter for one team due to winning of the toss, then so be it - the same thing happens under other favourable and unfavourable conditions so why not hot temperature as well.

If the player is suffering from the heat, they will do one of two things - get out if they are a batsman or try and fight it and suffer the conciquences. I think Mark Taylor, Dean Jones and Ponting have all suffered from batting long innings in India - its part of the game there and is why it is so tough to beat them - that is there conditions, like Englands is swinging conditions.