From the spot where Helen Julius spread her arms across the peeling, sun-flecked green paint of the pavilion’s bench seats, Eden Park’s Outer Oval in Auckland was almost picturesque.
There were the white-clad cricketers – Auckland batting, Canterbury in the field – and a bank of agapanthus just beginning to break out in flower beyond the sight-screen on the ground’s northern boundary. Sparrows, nesting in the pavilion roof, chattered incessantly.
Julius was one of only 30 or so spectators on hand for the match held earlier this month in the Plunket Shield, New Zealand’s four-day first-class domestic competition that has run since 1906. The previous day she counted just a dozen fellow spectators during the morning session. “People don’t even know it’s on.”
She remembers when domestic cricket fixtures would take place inside nearby Eden Park stadium – New Zealand’s biggest – rather than in the smaller oval beside it.
“It looked fairly empty, but you’d get a few hundred people,” she says. Many more would follow along on the radio until ball-by-ball radio coverage of domestic games ceased in the 2011-12 season. Now, the only domestic cricket broadcast on New Zealand television is the Super Smash, the national Twenty20 competition.
For Julius and other fans, the Plunket Shield, with its almost 120-year history, is an important link to the history of the game, and the sometimes languorous cadence of its play is a throwback to a time before successive reductions in the hours of play led cricket into an age dominated by T20 cricket. And yet, this most low-key form of the game has retained a coterie of committed fans, for whom it is, as much as anything, a link to their own histories.
The lack of spectators gives the games an atmosphere reminiscent of Julius’ first cricketing memories as a preschooler playing on the sidelines of club games at Rotorua’s Smallbone Park, her father running in to bowl. Those days “planted a seed”, she says, and while she never played herself – in her day, cricket wasn’t offered at school as an option for girls – a morning at the cricket connects her to those treasured childhood experiences.
As it does for Roy Cresswell, 74, a retired shipping officer whose formative cricketing experiences were of watching greats like Basil D’Oliveira and Tom Graveney bat for Worcestershire in his native England. The family had moved out of the county so the beautiful New Road cricket ground, sitting in the shadow of Worcester Cathedral, had been “a bit of a hike before the motorways came”. But worth it: sitting between his father and the day’s picnic basket, Cresswell discovered a passion for cricket that followed him to New Zealand when he emigrated in the late 1970s. He later coached his son and umpired in Auckland Premier Grade cricket, where his abiding memory was adjudicating as a 15-year-old Martin Guptill, later to represent New Zealand nearly 370 times across formats, breeze to a big century.
Cresswell has travelled as far away as Rangiora in the middle of the South Island to watch Auckland play Plunket Shield cricket, and he retains a purist’s enduring love for the red-ball game – a form of the game, he believes, that gives cricketers the technical proficiency they need to prosper in the shorter formats, such as T20.
“If they don’t get [it from here], where are the players going to get the grounding from?” Cresswell asks.
The zeitgeist of cricket is now firmly represented by T20 cricket and the behemoth of the Indian Premier League (IPL), whose enormous reach could be felt even at this unlikely venue. Fanna Share, 55, ensconced in the shade of a big tree on the eastern boundary, was there to support his nephew, Bevan-John Jacobs, the Pretoria-born batter who had been a surprise pick at the IPL auction several days earlier, picked up by the Mumbai Indians for NZ$60,000.
For Share, who emigrated from South Africa in 1999, the enjoyment of the Plunket Shield lies in the delayed gratification of a four-day game as opposed to the three-hour T20 runtime – even if much of the world seemed to have moved on from the pleasures of packing a cooler and setting aside a day to follow the game’s unhurried rhythms.
Five years ago, the Plunket Shield was reduced to eight rounds from 10 in a cost-cutting measure, and Share is realistic about the financial realities of contemporary cricket – particularly in New Zealand, where the proceeds from the international game are required to fund a domestic programme unable to fund itself.
“It’s almost like T20 is keeping first-class cricket alive,” he says.
Yet he saw some cause for optimism in his nephew’s ambitions to play long-form cricket. Jacobs would go on to make a relatively patient 80, prised out on the second morning after a sustained spell of short-pitched bowling targeted his ribs, once causing a stoppage in play after a bouncer had breached his defence with an audible dull thud, the medical staff jogging on to take a look.
That bruising, compelling passage of play was different from the kind of examination Jacobs might face in the IPL. Julius only regretted there were so few people there to witness it.
“I just fear for cricket as a whole at this level. You’ve got to have it to push people up to the next level, but nobody comes to watch.”