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Sports correspondent & historian with |
The Bay Oval is set for another bumper season of cricket, highlighted by the visit of the current superstars of the game. India will return to the Blake Park international wicket for the first time in six years.
India will play the Black Caps in two day-night ODI encounters on November 13 and 15, 2026.
The Western Bay venue is expected to sell out, while a massive Asian television audience, measured in the hundreds of thousands of cricket fans, will watch and stream the games into their living rooms.
While the Bay Oval is now a premier international cricket ground, my interest in history led me to wonder how we arrived at this point.
Winding back the clock to the beginning of Bay of Plenty representative cricket in the 1930s reveals that Rotorua was not only the centre of Bay of Plenty local government but also hosted all of the region’s early representative home games.
Bay of Plenty played the MCC at Rotorua’s Government Gardens in 1936 and staged other representative matches at Kuirau Reserve and Smallbone Park.
The 1945 census provides a clue as to why representative cricket was not staged in the Western Bay of Plenty. Rotorua’s urban population of 6645 was significantly larger than Tauranga’s population of about 4712 residents.
The Bay of Plenty Cricket Association, based in Rotorua, affiliated with the New Zealand Cricket Association in 1931, concentrating the power of the game in the seat of Bay of Plenty local government.
Smallbone Park became the preferred venue for Bay of Plenty representative cricket, with Whakatāne’s Rex Morpeth Park and, occasionally, Te Puke Domain serving as alternative locations.
December 25 and 26, 1952, saw a rare Bay of Plenty representative match in Tauranga. The fixture was significant, being a Hawke Cup elimination match against Manawatū at the Tauranga Domain.
The local government power base shifted to the Western Bay of Plenty when Tauranga’s urban population overtook Rotorua’s in 1976. Tauranga and Mount Maunganui cricket administrators became increasingly vocal in their calls for representative cricket. Tauranga Domain then began alternating with Smallbone Park in hosting New Zealand Cricket major and minor association matches.
During the 1980s, both the Blake Park wicket and the Mount Maunganui Cricket Club facilities underwent substantial upgrades. On December 28, 1987, a New Zealand Cricket major association one-day match between Northern Districts and Central Districts marked the beginning of Blake Park’s emergence as a regular Shell Cup venue for the next decade and a half.
The last major association match played on the Mount clubhouse wicket took place in January 2002. New Zealand Cricket cited substandard pitches as the reason for the demise of the popular holiday-season one-day fixtures.
The loss of professional cricket at Blake Park quickly became the catalyst for the development of a purpose-built first-class cricket ground on what was then wasteland at Blake Park. The redevelopment aimed to create a “village green” atmosphere where up to 10,000 spectators could once again witness the frenetic action of limited-overs cricket.
March 1, 2005, marked the beginning of the Bay Oval with the ceremonial turning of the first sod.
The establishment of the standalone Bay Oval Cricket Trust, separated from Bay of Plenty Cricket in 2009, accelerated the long-term planning of a venue capable of hosting international matches.
A second major factor in the Bay Oval’s development came in 2010 with the appointment of New Zealand Cricket turf expert Jared Carter as Bay Oval turf manager.
The dream of international cricket became a reality in the spring of 2015 when South Africa played two ODI encounters against the Black Caps at the Bay Oval.
A decade later, all three forms of the international game have become regular attractions at the Bay Oval.
The ground’s seventh ICC test match is scheduled for February 2027.