Welcome to the Colour of Spring
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So the experiment of playing cricket in New Zealand in October hasn’t gone so well. Glamour opponents have come here for some T20s and there hasn’t been a lot of it. England takes away the KFC T20 series with one win out of three.
Strangely, if the last T20 match had been held in Wellington, coming off a 24-hour Red Warning, the game would have been completed in front of not a lot of people. The narrative would then have been about yellow seats.
Sliding doors moment.
And with the climate becoming wilder as time goes the risk will only increase.
But this is not on NZC getting it wrong as some people who should know better have suggested.
The answer to that is that it’s the way BCCI ICC tournaments are now run. The current trend of BCCI ICC tournaments held in Jan-Mar before an increasingly early IPL means the domestic NZ summer is now spring. Clearly, this is sub optimal, but NZC has been forced into a spring corner.
Scheduling games against England and Australia in October was always going to be a wild risk, but not scheduling those games was always going to be worse.
NZC is playing poker with a pretty shitty hand of cards. But this is the new reality. There will be many more Springs of Cricket, and the fickleness that goes with it.
Blaming NZC for this is akin to blaming wind on trees for waving their branches.