From the spot where Helen Julius spread her arms across the peeling, sun-flecked green paint of the pavilion’s bench seats, Eden Park’s Outer Oval in Auckland was almost picturesque.
There were the white-clad cricketers – Auckland batting, Canterbury in the field – and a bank of agapanthus just beginning to break out in flower beyond the sight-screen on the ground’s northern boundary. Sparrows, nesting in the pavilion roof, chattered incessantly.
