Canterbury Crickets vision for Test Cricket at Hagley Oval

The search for the best venue to host test cricket in Christchurch has been occurring for over ten years and for the first time Canterbury Cricket, New Zealand Cricket, the Christchurch City Council and Vbase are all in agreement on where this venue should be.

The late Dick Brittenden, in his wonderful book ‘100 Years of Cricket’ encapsulated the place of cricket in the birth and development of the province when he wrote:“Cricket in Canterbury had a natural birth. The settlement in 1850 was a planned reproduction of a piece of England in a strange land 12,000 miles away.  It was a church-based design, but the bat went with the bible, for if there was to be another England, there most certainly had to be cricket.”

There was cricket and Hagley Oval was its home, and still is its home, even though test cricket has been lost to the city for nearly 10 years as the redevelopment of AMI Stadium (Lancaster Park) and the encroachment of the growing rugby season, amongst several different reasons, meant no suitable venue for the longer version of the game in the city.                                            

That can all change with the sympathetic development of Hagley Oval into a “village green” Test Cricket venue, where club, provincial and test cricket can co-exist in the most wonderful of settings.

And the good news is that this can be developed without doing anything that has not already been done on Hagley Park before and without changing Hagley Oval significantly. 

Please click here to read about the vision that Canterbury Cricket has for Hagley Oval to become a “village green” home for club, representative and test cricket.