Indoor nets in a 45°C summer: how UAE cricketers keep their game alive

Anyone who's tried to bat at midday in an Abu Dhabi July knows the outdoor game isn't just uncomfortable in summer — it's genuinely unsafe for long stretches of the day. Grounds bake, afternoons become unusable, and a lot of clubs quietly go dark until October.

For a young player halfway through a season, four months off the field isn't a rest. It's four months of ground lost to whoever kept training somewhere else.

Climate-controlled indoor nets take the heat out of the decision entirely. A session at 6pm in July can look and feel almost identical to a session in November — same intensity, same technical work, same real coaching — because the temperature in the room isn't dictating what's possible.

That consistency matters more than it sounds. Technique built over a full year, without a four-month gap, simply holds up better than technique that has to be half-rebuilt every autumn.

Most families in Abu Dhabi aren't training at noon anyway — work, school and the heat all point the same direction, towards evenings. Indoor nets in the evening let a full session happen in comfort, at a time that actually fits around a working parent's day and a school week.

Indoor nets shouldn't mean watered-down cricket. The best indoor sessions still work on match-realistic bowling, real batting reps against varied pace and length, and fielding drills adapted to the space — not just throwdowns in a corridor.

The measure of a good indoor programme is simple: does a player come out of September at the same level they went in at in May, or better? If summer is treated as a proper training block rather than a hibernation, the answer should be better.

At MAX Sports, our indoor nets run right through the summer, with evening sessions built for exactly this climate. It's not a workaround — it's how a serious cricket programme in the UAE has to operate if it wants players improving in July as well as January.

If your child's season currently stops when the heat arrives, that's worth asking your academy about. Ours doesn't have to.