NZC springs into action

Eden Park hosted the country’s first day-night test against England in March, and drew a crowd of 33,692 for the February Twenty20 international against Australia.

The country’s biggest stadium with an excellent drop-in pitch has a knack of staging thrilling cricket matches but the prohibitive hire cost was a big turnoff, particularly when hosting teams other than crowd-pullers Australia, England or India.

‘‘We’ve had some fantastic fixtures at Eden Park but it’s a very large stadium and it does cost money to open it. You can’t run games at a loss.

‘‘The security, cleaning, traffic management plan, makes it a challenge for us to play test matches and smaller international fixtures there. That’s the reality. Therefore we haven’t played as much test cricket as we would have liked in our biggest populated area.’’

It means Eden Park may well have hosted its last test match. White has ruled out it hosting one of the five scheduled tests this season against Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. India are scheduled to play five ODIs and three T20 internationals in New Zealand early next year and White said Eden Park remained a very important venue for some of those matches.

NZC’s submission said a more ‘‘cricket-centric’’ Western Springs Stadium could become the country’s leading international cricket venue and high performance base.