Long, unhurried days with a cooler: the cricket fans sticking with New Zealand’s forgotten format | New Zealand

From where Helen Julius spread her arms over the peeling, sun-flecked green paint of the pavilion benches, Eden Park’s outer oval in Auckland it was almost picturesque.

There were the white-clad cricketers – Auckland batting, Canterbury in the outfield – and a group of agapanthus just beginning to bloom beyond the screen on the north boundary of the pitch. The sparrows nesting on the roof of the pavilion chattered incessantly.

Julius was one of only about 30 spectators at the meeting held earlier this month in the Plunket Shield, New Zealand’s four-day premier domestic competition which has been held since 1906. The day before, she counted only a dozen other viewers during the morning session. “People don’t even know it’s on.”

She remembers when domestic cricket matches were held at the nearby Eden Park stadium – New Zealand’s largest – instead of the smaller oval next door.

“It looked pretty empty, but you’d get a few hundred people,” she says. Many more would follow them on the radio until the 2011-2012 season. radio broadcasts of domestic matches ceased. Now the only local cricket broadcast on New Zealand television is Super Smash, the national Twenty20 competition.

For Julius and other fans, the Plunket Shield, with its nearly 120-year history, is an important link to the game’s history, and the sometimes languid cadence of its play is a throwback to a time before the successive cuts to cricket playing hours in an era dominated by cricket T20. And yet, this lowest form of the game has retained a group of dedicated fans, for whom it is as much a link to their own history as anything else.

The lack of spectators gives the games an atmosphere reminiscent of Julius’ first memories of playing cricket as a pre-schooler, playing on the sidelines of club matches at Smallbone Park in Rotorua, her father running to bowl. Those days “planted a seed”, she says, and although she never played herself – in her day cricket was not offered at school as an option for girls – a morning of cricket connects her to those precious childhood experiences.

And so for Roy Cresswell, 74, a retired naval officer whose formative experience in cricket was watching greats like Basil D’Oliveira and Tom Graveney bat for Worcestershire in his native England. The family had moved from the county, so the beautiful New Road Cricket Ground, set in the shadow of Worcester Cathedral, was “a bit of a walk before the motorways came”. But it’s worth it: sitting between his father and the day’s picnic basket, Creswell discovered a passion for cricket that followed him to New Zealand when he emigrated in the late 1970s. He later coached his son and was an umpire in Auckland Premier Class cricket, where his abiding memory was umpiring as a 15-year-old Martin Guptill, who went on to represent New Zealand nearly 370 times in all formats, minor to major century.

Creswell has traveled as far as Rangiora in the mid-South Island to watch Auckland play Plunket Shield cricket, and he retains an abiding purist’s love of the red-ball game – a form of the game he believes gives cricketers technical competence , which they need to thrive in the shorter formats like T20.

“If they don’t get [it from here]where are the players going to get the grounding from?” Creswell asks.

The zeitgeist of cricket is now firmly represented by T20 cricket and the behemoth of the Indian Premier League (IPL), the sheer reach of which can be felt even in this incredible venue. Fana Sheir, 55, ensconced in the shade of a large tree on the eastern boundary, was there to support his nephew, Bevan-John Jacobs, the Pretoria-born batsman who was a surprise pick in the IPL auction a few days earlier, selected from the Mumbai Indians for NZ$60,000.

For Share, who emigrated from South Africa in 1999, the pleasure of the Plunket Shield lies in the delayed gratification of a four-day game, as opposed to the three-hour runtime of T20 – even if much of the world seems to have moved on from the pleasures of packing a cooler and taking a day to follow the leisurely rhythms of the game.

Five years ago, the Plunket Shield was reduced to eight rounds from 10 as a cost-cutting measure and Share is realistic about the financial realities of modern cricket – particularly in New Zealand, where revenue from the international game is required to fund a domestic program that cannot to finance itself.

“It’s almost as if T20 is keeping first-class cricket alive,” he says.

Still, he saw some cause for optimism in his nephew’s ambitions to play long-term cricket. Jacobs would go on to make a relatively patient 80, rated on the second morning after a sustained spell of short-bowling aimed at his ribs, once causing a stoppage in play after a bounce breached his defense with an audible thump, medical staff, running to have a look.

This harrowing, gripping passage of play was unlike the kind of test Jacobs might face in the IPL. Julius only regretted that there were so few people to witness it.

“I just fear for cricket in general at this level. You have to have it to push people to the next level, but no one comes to watch.