The Basin test

Other cities like to stage their international cricket matches in the shadow of the Table Mountain, beside the Indian Ocean, or the Caribbean Sea. In Wellington, we play in the middle of a notoriously congested roundabout. Yet of all the test venues in all the world, the Basin Reserve somehow remains one of the loveliest, and there’s nothing that shouts ‘‘summer’’ quite like the opening day of the Basin test.

When Kane Williamson of New Zealand and Dinesh Chandimal of Sri Lanka lead their teams out this morning, they will see a somewhat different Basin, in the midst of a facelift that includes a much smarter pavilion for the players. The makeover is not before time. Lovely though the setting is, there’s an air of faded grandeur about the Basin, a sense of the past as another country.

It’s no coincidence that its fortunes have declined as the roads around it have clogged. Ambitious plans to improve both the traffic flow and the cricket ground have come and gone, and watching the progress of the Let’s Get Wellington Moving group is about as exciting as Geoffrey Boycott on a slow day.

What Wellington needs is a Colin de Grandhomme to start throwing the bat to inject some life into the interminable debate over the Basin. Otherwise commuters and cricket fans alike are set for a long and tedious game, with plenty of effort but no result in sight.