The end is nigh for stadium debate

Well, for the next 10 years at least, PLUS: Ipswich's blue moon, a six year old running a marathon and Kelleher's conviction.

Wynyard Point. Supplied

The Great Auckland Stadium Debate is lukewarming up again.

Having talked to various people aligned with the various options, at least one regards it as fait accompli that a rehash of Eden Park will get across the line, while others still think one of Te Toangaroa (aka Quay Park) or Wynyard Point has a puncher’s chance.

That fence-sitting pretty much how the New Zealand Herald seems to see it, with a recent Trevor McKewen column ($) basically handing the keys to Eden Park:

Sports writing is prone to using sporting cliches so I’ll get my apologies in early – almost two decades ago Auckland horribly fumbled the ball in turning down the Government’s offer to fund a new national stadium on the waterfront in time for the 2011 Rugby World Cup. Now – 18 years on and with the benefit of ongoing warnings about the cost of retaining Eden Park – we are once again about to drop a perfect pass, and knock-on with the line wide open.

The bad news is that Sports Insider’s many ears to the ground predict Eden Park will win out over the three waterfront stadium options as the country’s premier sports stadium. It will be far from an unanimously endorsed recommendation.

A week later this piece ran ($)  in the same masthead, which seemed to walk back on that idea:

A downtown stadium for Auckland remained on the cards as the decision-making process moved a step closer this week.

Despite recent speculation that Eden Park will be anointed as the preferred alternative, the Herald understands the situation is not that clear cut.

Instead, it is believed that multiple options – including Eden Park and at least one other city centre venue – will move to the next stage, pending a vote of the wider council on May 30.

It is understood that the four bids, which also includes the ‘sunken’ stadium on Bledisloe Wharf - which seems to be the longest shot - will have a final chance to present to a council working group on May 23, with a decision of which two will go through to a final feasibility process made by wider council vote on May 30. Eden Park will be one of the final two, which essentially puts Wynyard Point and Quay Park in a pre-run-off run-off.

So far, so above board… maybe.

A reliable spy has informed The Bounce of a Northern Club luncheon last week that at the very least raises eyebrows.

Evidently a key member of the Eden Park executive spoke at the lunch, put a ludicrously  discounted price on that park’s renovation, which includes a roof, and proceeded to run down the other proposals. That would all be par for the course, part of the game so to speak, if not for the fact that the person who introduced him so glowingly to the Working Style-suited crowd was the deputy mayor of the very city that is supposedly running an impartial, largely confidential process.

And that folks, is how business in this city gets done.

Full disclosure: I’m not a fan of Eden Park. Nothing about it moves any part of me, though I will concede to having a mild curiosity about the All Blacks’ unbelievable record there. As an edifice it is not pretty, it is not imposing, it is not atmospheric.

It’s just… there. Like a big, ugly bus terminus.

Eden Park. Getty Images

It is by far and away the worst international cricket ground I have been to and I can’t even think of a second place that is worthy of mentioning in the same sentence (though Lancaster Park was seriously below-average, University Oval didn’t cover itself in glory when in lieu of proper drainage it had to resort to kitty litter, pre-realignment Old Trafford was a bit feral and McLean Park is another ugly rugby ground posing as a cricket venue).

That’s my biggest bugbear about the place. It’s turned cricket, the national summer game, into either a farce or an irrelevance in the country’s biggest city.

The boundaries are inappropriate for white-ball cricket and the capacity far too large for tests.

That’s not NZC’s position, by the way, but mine. Plastic-bat boundaries or not, NZC would consider hosting ‘tier-one’ tests against England, Australia or India at the ground. It’s just that they haven’t since 2018, which incidentally was the only test hosted at the ground in the past 10 years.

Eden Park pitched aggressively for one of three England tests next summer. By rights, with a big Barmy Army presence guaranteed, Auckland was a logical landing spot for one of three tests, but in the end New Zealand Cricket went with other venues¹. That’s a lot of exchanged pounds sterling being spent in other cities.

Bet the Northern Clubbers were never told that over their consommé.

Anyway, enough from me on large patches of grass and concrete. The Bounce’s resident stadium junkie, Brian Finn, appeared on Radio New Zealand’s The Detail.

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