McLean Park Cricket Stadium

The McLean Park stadium is situated in the city of Napier, New Zealand and is one of the oldest venues for Test cricket. It is a home ground for the New Zealand cricket team and the Central Districts team. It has a crowd capacity of around 10,500. The two ends in this stadium are Centennial Stand End and Embankment End. Apart from cricket, Rugby is also played here.

It is considered as a batsman-friendly ground. It has hosted 53 international matches including 10 Tests, 42 ODIs and a lone T20.

History

It was established in the year 1952. The first ever international match played here was a Test match between New Zealand and the touring Pakistan team. The match ended in a draw after only 2 innings were completed in the match.

A 6th day had to be used as the 3rd day could not have any play. This match made the McLean Park the 50th Test venue.

Major Matches

It has been one of the venues for the ICC Cricket World Cup 2015 that was held in Australia and New Zealand. It hosted 3 games in the tournament. All of them were group games.

New Zealand scored the highest Test team total of 619/9 in March 2009 against India. Jesse Ryder scored 201 for the hosts, while Gautam Gambhir played a slow 436 balls 137 runs to save India and end the match in a draw. His innings lasted for 643 minutes.

The highest ODI team total of 373/8 is also scored by New Zealand against Zimbabwe.

Controversies

A controversy was created due to the stadium’s poor drainage facility. In an ODI in the Chappell-Hadlee series in February 2017, there was no rain in Napier for a significant amount of time before the match.

But the water on the ground had still not gone away from the surface of the outfield. Some of the other grounds near the stadium where the teams practiced had dried down completely a few hours ago.