Black Caps fans will have to go without top-level cricket over their prime holiday period next summer. Photo / Photosport
Black Caps fans will have to go without top-level cricket over their prime holiday period next summer. Photo / Photosport
Two of the big-three cricketing superpowers will tour New Zealand next summer to placate the Black Caps' elongated absence over the 2022-23 holiday period.
That tour will leave New Zealand cricket fans with no Black Caps fixtures during the prime home holiday period, and no international Boxing Day fixture to attend for a second successive year.
Mt Maunganui's Bay Oval hosted New Zealand's eighth and last Boxing Day test against Pakistan in 2020, with sell-out crowds packing the embankments. Two years prior, the 2018 Boxing Day test against Sri Lanka at Christchurch's Hagley Oval featured an 8000-capacity crowd.
Hagley Oval also hosted popular Boxing Day ODI fixtures from 2015-2017.
Despite the Black Caps' holiday absence next summer, India and England will tour New Zealand in a 2022/23 home schedule that is expected to begin as early as October and run late into summer - due to the Black Caps first tour of Pakistan, the timing of which was agreed by both nations under the Future Tours Programme.
India's arrival will be limited to short-format fixtures while England and Sri Lanka are scheduled for respective two-test series - something of a staple of the Black Caps' diet.
New Zealand's second trip to Pakistan in April 2023 will replace the tour they abandoned last September because of threats against the team.
The September tour would have been the Black Caps' first of Pakistan since 2003, but it had to be abandoned after the New Zealand Government supplied information that terrorists were planning an attack on the scheduled matches.
It later emerged, via Government documents, that the NZ Security Intelligence Service received information through its Five Eyes intelligence network that there was "attack-planning against the New Zealand Cricket team".
Scenes from Mount Maunganui in 2019. Photo / Photosport
The Black Caps' April 2023 tour of Pakistan comprises five ODIs and five T20s - two extra ODIs above those initially scheduled - and will take place mid-year, as it needs to be played during the ICC's scheduled touring cycle, which ends in May 2023.
The timing of the April tour will, however, inevitably force New Zealand to send a second-string team to Pakistan, as it clashes with the lucrative Indian Premier League which is scheduled to start from April 8.
With this year's IPL delayed until October, the likes of Kane Williamson, Kyle Jamieson, Trent Boult, Jimmy Neesham, Ish Sodhi, Devon Conway, Tim Southee and Mitchell Santner were not involved in the Black Caps' abandoned tour of Pakistan.
After finishing their last test in India on December 6, this summer the Black Caps do not begin their home series until the first of two tests against Bangladesh in Tauranga on January 1.
Two tests against South Africa in February and March headline the home summer, with three Twenty20s against Australia and three ODIs against the Netherlands also scheduled.
