Top-level domestic cricket returning to Queens Park
The home of Southland cricket was stripped of its first-class warrant of fitness status in 2021, now domestic cricket is back.
LOGAN SAVORY | The Southland TRibune
After close to three years in the wilderness, top level domestic cricket will return to Southland’s premier venue in November.
New Zealand Cricket released its 2023-2024 domestic playing schedule on Tuesday which included Queens Park as one of 15 venues throughout the country.
The Otago Volts will host Auckland in a List A one-day fixture at Queens Park on November 25.
It will be the first white-ball Otago Volts game played at the venue in five years.
The Otago Volts will also play Canterbury in another one-day game Invercargill on December 12.
To add to that the Otago Sparks will play back-to-back games at Queens Park on December 9 and 10.
Southland Cricket Association board chair Jason Domigan said they still have a couple of boxes to tick in the lead up to the Volts games to confirm the required groundwork has been done.
“It is a good result for the [Southland Cricket Association] and the work with the council to get the drainage repaired, and also the work that has been done renewing our wicket blocks, and the new scoreboard.
“All those sorts of things show a real intent from Southland to get back on the radar,” Domigan said.
The home of Southland cricket was stripped of its first-class warrant of fitness status in 2021. It stemmed from ongoing drainage problems over many years at the venue, in particular at the duck pond end of the ground.
It wasn’t a problem that crept up on the Southland Cricket Association.
Successive general managers tried to address the situation at the Invercargill City Council-owned ground.
The council carried out drainage improvements in 2015 which the SCA was very thankful for.
But despite that drainage work problems remained at the duck pond end of the ground. There seemed to be some faults around the connection of the ring drain down by the large trees at the problematic end of the ground.
Questions about the state of the drainage resurfaced in March 2021 when a Plunket Shield game between the Otago Volts and the Auckland Aces was abandoned despite blue skies throughout the time the fixture was supposed to be played.
Invercargill had a lot of rain before the start of the game and part of the ground struggled to handle it.
New Zealand Cricket advised the SCA it needed to prove the ground can handle a certain amount of rain before it would regain its first-class warrant of fitness status.
The Southland Cricket Association’s quest was to get the issues sorted and have top-level domestic cricket back at Queens Park in Invercargill during the 2023-2024 season.
That has happened.
Another box SCA needed to tick in order to meet the warrant of fitness standards was a functional electronic scoreboard.
SCA - with the support of the likes of the ILT, Community Trust South, Otago Cricket, and Aotearoa Gaming Trust - has sorted the scoreboard requirement.
“It’s important to have domestic cricket, both the Volts and the Sparks. To be fair to Otago Cricket we haven’t just got one fixture, we’ve got Volts games and Sparks games. It shows their commitment to have cricket in Southland,” Domigan said.
“We are just also finalising the Sparks coming for a preseason camp at the start of November. That relationship between Otago Cricket and Southland Cricket is pretty strong at the moment.”