Heritage et AL

With the cricket season in full swing it’s timely to look at three of the earliest books about cricket in New Zealand. On the tented fields of the south, 1882 along with Pavilion echoes from the south, 1884-5 and the less poetically titled The Auckland cricketers’ trip to the south [1873], are early accounts of the Auckland cricket team’s tours of the country that helped popularise the sport in the province. Ref: Henry Winkelmann, Showing a group of schoolboys playing cricket in Auckland Domain..., 9 December 1901, Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, 1-W152.

Over the last month New Zealand and Australia have been joint hosts of the latest edition of the Cricket World Cup. It started on 14 February in Christchurch and we have now begun the knockout stages. There are two remaining games in New Zealand: the quarter-final in Wellington on Saturday and the semi-final on Tuesday at Eden Park in Auckland. The final is at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Sunday 29 March. Ref: Eric W Young, Showing a cricket game at Eden Park, 1980s, Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, 1021-324.

The Dick Smith NRL Auckland Nines tournament takes place this weekend at that most hallowed of sports grounds, Eden Park. (Go the Warriors, just quietly!) Last year was the inaugural tournament and in the lead-up, I took a nostalgic look back, via our family history blog Kintalk, at the old league ground, Carlaw Park.  Now, we're skipping across town to the tournie venue itself - the stadium where that girl-and-boy-crush Richie McCaw held the Webb Ellis trophy aloft at the Rugby World Cup Final in 2011 - Eden Park.  The park began as a cricket ground in 1903, and was due to the vision of one Harry Ryan, a cricket enthusiast who approached landowner John Walters to lease part of his land as a sports field.  In the book   Eden Park: A History,  the authors write, "Certainly the rough paddock strewn with stones, studded with outcrops of rock and streaked with cowpats, falling away to a boggy trough that filled in a downpour and remained flooded throughout ...