By Ahmad Khawaja
It continues to be a busy period of indoor cricket for the Christchurch and Canterbury region, with the announcement by the ICNZ Board that the city has been awarded the rights to host the Trans-Tasman series between New Zealand and Australia, which will take place in September 2019.
It is more welcome news for the city, which boasts a proud indoor cricketing history, and has recently returned to the National fold in terms of hosting major events. It successfully held the Junior Provincial Championships back in July, and will also host the National Club Championships (Club Nationals) next week. Later this month it will also be the location for the Junior World Series, bringing across teams from countries including Australia, South Africa, England and Singapore.
The Action Indoor Sports Hornby Centre will be the venue for the event, which will be played out from 5 – 7 September 2019 and feature the Premier Men’s, Premier Women’s, Under-22 Boy’s and Under-22 Girl’s divisions respectively. Each division will play five test matches each during the series. The last series was held in 2016 in Port Macquarie, New South Wales whilst there was a break last year due to the World Cup.
ICNZ Executive Mark Cini was extremely pleased with the decision, showing how far the city has come in the last few years, with a lot of hard work paying off. “It’s really great news. It just gets better for Christchurch, playing host to some major tournaments this year, and then a large scale international series next year. A lot of people have worked very hard to get it back onto the map and I’m pleased it’s starting to come to fruition”, said Cini. He continued “Action Indoor Sports Hornby will play host to the some of the Nationals tournament and all of the Junior World Series. It’s a state-of-the-art facility, regarded as one of the premier centres in the country and the feedback I had from a lot of people after the Junior Provincials was that it was a fantastic venue and an excellent place to play at. A lot of improvement work has gone on at Hornby to make it one of the best centres going around and multi-purpose to that effect. We are really looking forward to hosting the event”.
