Avondale racecourse - good for horses and markets, very not good for young cricketers. Photo / Richard Robinson
Avondale racecourse - good for horses and markets, very not good for young cricketers. Photo / Richard Robinson
After a search that has taken in some of the bleakest expanses of turf this great country has to offer the worst sports ground in New Zealand can be officially declared.
Come forward and accept your award, Avondale racecourse.
The enormous greensward that hosts the Avondale Jockey Club in Auckland's inner west is earmarked for closure under a proposal to rationalise New Zealand's thoroughbred racing industry. Loyal Avondale Market clients and racing enthusiasts might be devastated – those who have ever watched sport on its infield will surely celebrate.
As I paced around the infield last weekend, watching some of the city's most talented intermediate school-age cricketers, I wondered how many of the windswept kids were standing in the field daydreaming not about runs and wickets but about being indoors playing Fortnite.
The wind was cold, the tundra was long, the ruts were deep and even the long barrier, a quaint fielding technique popular in the 70s, was no guarantee of stopping the ball.
On some London fields they reckon you can feel the presence of all those souls buried beneath during the Great Plague. On Avondale racecourse I could sense the destroyed souls of all those forced to play cricket there.
Hyperbole! Yes! But Avondale is a godawful ground, and that's not stretching truth.
Cricket isn't the easiest sport to accommodate and every former player will testify to the perilous situation where fielding at deep square leg on one oval makes you effectively a rear-facing silly point on the adjacent field. There has always been an element of humour and stoicism about playing cricket on terrible, multi-purpose paddocks, but it's becoming less of a joke these days.
School children at the cricket. Photo / Photosport
Fewer kids are playing cricket. Those that do play are harder to keep in the game. Administrators can't be blind to the fact that these type of experiences - of playing on ill-prepared, unsuitable grounds - go into the memory bank and are withdrawn a year later when, older and not much wiser, kids decide whether they want to continue playing.
Another reason it's harder to keep them in the game is parents.
Mums and dads have a profound effect on the sporting choices their kids make and that was other thing that stood out at Avondale on Saturday: there were bugger-all parents on the sidelines. You couldn't blame any of them for staying away. The "park", which has no shelter, is totally unsuited for spectating families.
If these children don't feel their parents are invested in their sport, they'll quickly lose interest too.
It didn't look or feel like the start of an exciting new season. It looked and felt more like the carcass of a once-great pastime. Bad facilities don't harden kids up, they don't teach them resilience, they just hand them excuses to do something else.
If this reads like an over-egged response to one bad Saturday experience, then you're probably right, but it points to a wider malaise in the sport: cricket has enough battles to deal with in the digital age without putting themselves in unnecessary headlocks.
The solution is surely not that difficult. Start the season two weeks later. Parents could use more of a breather after winter sport and clubs and municiple authorities can use that time to prepare grounds properly. Identify fields that are unfit for families and do not use them for kids cricket.
If somebody gets a knighthood principally for services to sports administration, and then it transpires he was chairman of a board heavily criticised for a glaring lack of directorial oversight, does the country get to take that knighthood back and redistribute it to a more appropriate recipient?
Asking for a friend.
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Columns are by definition self-indulgent, so forgive me while I brag about the fact I went to Fenway Park twice this year and watched the Boston Red Sox lay waste to the Los Angeles Angels. Just a few months later they beat another Los Angeles team, the Dodgers, to win a World Series. Could I be any more smug at this point in time? Probably not.
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