Brendon McCullum stunned the Australians with an incandescent display of hitting in Christchurch last night, but thousands of fans missed a good chunk of his century, and New Zealand's stunning victory, because they were still queuing outside AMI Stadium.
The spotlight will once more fall on the country's major stadiumsahead of the Rugby World Cup after punters were left queuing for more than half an hour to get into the recently redeveloped ground.
Last month, North Harbour Stadium staff were also caught out by a large walk-up crowd before the Blues-Hurricanes Super 14 clash, with many fans still dribbling into the ground half an hour after kickoff.
Bryan Pearson, chief executive of Vbase, the company that manages AMI Stadium, said fans had to be realistic.
"The biggest issue we faced tonight was that we had a very large walk-up crowd. Over 4500 walked up to the stadium without a ticket from about 40 minutes before the start of the match.
"With the redeveloped stadium we have substantially more capacity to sell tickets immediately prior to the game, but when you get those numbers of people who turn up with a short lead time before the match you are going to get substantial queuing issues."
Mr Pearson said he had staff monitoring processing of the queue and the maximum waiting time was about 35 minutes.
"If people turned up, as many did, with 10 minutes to go, they weren't getting into the ground until 6.30-6.35pm," he said. "There's a point at which we can't physically process that number of people who turn up close to the beginning of the game.
"There's no stadium in the world that offers that sort of service."
Mr Pearson said Vbase was looking to fine-tune its processes.
