Cricket
Cricket has long been played at Lancaster Park. It was the first game to be played in this stadium and in fact, Lancaster Park was originally a cricket stadium. Day/night cricket was made possible after the lighting towers were added in 1996—the first in a major New Zealand stadium. These were first put to use in 1997 when New Zealand played England in front of a crowd of 25,000.
Because of the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake One Day Internationals can no longer be played in the city as this was the only ground that had the capacity to host them. Test Matches have been moved to Rangiora and Lincoln University Ovals.
Read more about this topic: Lancaster Park
Famous quotes containing the word cricket:
“All cries are thin and terse;
The field has droned the summer’s final mass;
A cricket like a dwindled hearse
Crawls from the dry grass.”
—Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)