It’s the largest ground on planet New Zealand, most modern, looking down imposingly on the rest of the City of Sails from a high mount on one end of Auckland. Unlike any other stadium here, it has a fully seated capacity of 50,000 and — most differently — does not look like a cricket ground but like an egg which has been flattened out on top and low ends which means flattened out ropes on both ends of the wicket.
Eden Park has had its run-ins and rivalries through ages ever since it was opened in 1900. For summers, it is all cricket, and then it is all rugby even though it started off as a purely cricketing destination when one fine day, a gentleman called Harry Ryan stood on Kingsland Road and looked out over a rough paddock strewn with stones, rocky outcrops, cowpats and a swamp at the bottom. He saw a cricket ground there and that’s Eden Park for you since 1900.
The outsides of this cricket ground are adorned not with cricketer statues but with men down the ages holding the flat oval ball, in short, rugby grandmasters. Ask why and the history is rolled out for you. New Zealand cricket has not won a single World Cup till date but the rugby guys have — one in 1987 and the other in 2011, both on this ground. It’s here that Rugby Test captain Richie McCaw became a super celebrity and it’s here where strife sport had its most tumultuous moments.
As far as cricket is concerned, it showed its lowest of lows here in 1955 when in the second innings of a Test match against England, New Zealand got out for just 26 runs with four ducks and a top individual score of 11 runs. This total remains the lowest ever in Test innings worldwide.
And, in rugby, when the All Blacks played the South Africans during the apartheid era, there were massive protests. During the final of the game in 1981, the third and deciding Test of the controversial Springbok Rugby Tour, protestors went into riot mode against the cops outside the ground. Several were injured and just then a small plane, piloted by protestor Marx Jones, circled the park, dropping flour bombs into the middle of the ground one of which hit All Black Gary Knight. However, play continued till the final whistle with an injury-time penalty kick giving the All Blacks a series win of 25-22.
Cricket got proud in the middle here in 1956 when New Zealand won its first-ever Test match, beating the West Indies by 190 runs.
Such rich lore is embedded in the lush green outfield here which, incidentally, is natural grass grown over a synthetic mat, with a portable pitch laid out every summer and removed every winter for rugby to take over. This turf is grown in a nursery at a turf farm in Karaka in Auckland before it is spread out in Eden Park.
Being a multisport stadium, the field is changed for each sport. The cricket season has a portable wicket tray and for all other sports, this wicket is replaced with a Strath Ayr portable sand tray similar to the rest of the playing surface.
As you look down on the outfield from the level IV Press box you wonder what that strange machine down there is doing, dropping white marking dots all over the field. Well, that’s the chief groundsman irrigating the park in a unique irrigation trolley called Rainbird which has 7,005 sprinkler nodes managed by a computer and he is circling the pitch and irrigating the lush outfield dropping markers on either end of the irrigated area so that the next round does not overlap. But don’t worry sogginess is least of the issues here what with the field having exceptional drainage levels that can absorb up to 75mm of rain an hour.