Fingers crossed for McLean Park ODI: ‘I think we’ll get a game’

McLean Park is in amazing condition, reckons city council event manager Kevin Murphy. Photo / Napier City Council

Fingers are crossed for Hawke’s Bay’s first day-night 50 overs cricket international in six years, despite a forecast for rain.

The Black Caps and West Indies match at McLean Park, Napier, is set to start at 2pm Wednesday.

MetService was on Tuesday forecasting more than 20mm of rain for Napier from late Tuesday night to early Wednesday evening, which compares with just 12.8mm already in November.

There was a near cloudless sky as the Black Caps practised on Tuesday morning, on a ground Napier City Council event manager Kevin Murphy said looked in “amazing” condition after preparation by the council’s ground staff.

It’s almost 30 years since a big council investment in upgrading the McLean Park floodlighting led to New Zealand’s first day-night international cricket, a 50 overs match between the Black Caps and Zimbabwe on February 3, 1996.

Four months later, the All Blacks and Samoa played the first rugby test under floodlights in New Zealand.

Both matches packed the park, with crowds of about 20,000.

Murphy concedes “those days are gone”.

“If we get anything near 4000 people it will be seen as a good crowd,” he said.

Optimistically, he was hoping for the clouds clustering in the hills to “roll away”.

“I think we’ll get a game of cricket in,” he said.

Tomorrow’s game is the third of a three-match series, which opened with the Black Caps winning by seven runs in Christchurch on Sunday.

The third match is in Hamilton on Saturday.

It’s the first big event at McLean Park this summer, to be followed by two transtasman winter-sports clashes.

On February 28 the New Zealand Warriors and Sydney side Manly Sea Eagles play a late-afternoon NRL pre-season rugby league match, and on March 13 the Hurricanes play a Super Rugby competition match at night against Australian side Western Force.

Several other domestic competition cricket matches are also scheduled.

Action when the West Indies last played a 50 overs-a-side match in Napier, a World Cup match against United Arab Emirates in 2015.

• The last Black Caps day-nighter at the park was in 2019, when NZ beat Bangladesh by seven wickets.
• Since then, daytime one-dayers have been a nine wicket loss to Bangladesh in 2023 and a 73 run win over Pakistan on March 29 this year.
• The last time the West Indies played in Napier was a 2015 World Cup match against United Arab Emirates.
• The last time they played the Black Caps on the ground was a rain-affected match in 2009, when New Zealand won by nine runs under the game’s Duckworth Lewis adjusted run-rates system.

Doug Laing has been a newspaper reporter for more than 50 years, including in Napier when Napier had its first test cricket match in 1979.