Avondale Racecourse — dour, dreaded destroyer of young cricketing dreams

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 schoolage 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.

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fact that these type of experiences — of playing on illprepared, unsuitable grounds — go into the memory bank and are withdrawn a year later when, older and not much wiser, kids decide whether they want to continue