The Pink Report

It’s Not About The Cricket

Tonight at Seddon Park in Hamilton there’s going to be a cricket match and behind the scenes there’s a phalanx of organising types who have been wondering if they’ve done the right thing by going ahead.

Needless to say, down in Canterbury the Wizards aren’t meeting the Firebirds in their scheduled Plunket Shield match today and the White Ferns’ ODI series with Australia at Lincoln has been abandoned. For the rest of us, it feels weird to be carrying on as normal, let alone playing sport. A minute’s silence seems so feeble. At Auckland’s Colin Maiden Park this morning naturally the guys will observe that respectful silence and don black armbands - a picture that will be repeated at Seddon Park when past New Zealand and Australian players join together for the Titans International Twenty20 this evening. Far from the epicentre and its devastating S-waves, it’s no less anxious waiting for news or gut-wrenching attempting to comprehend the gravitas in Christchurch. What are we doing?

The Christchurch earthquake is not only a regional tragedy, but a national one - that’s abundantly clear. The most shattering disaster New Zealand has experienced, Black Tuesday is going to touch us all. So small is New Zealand that everyone has some connection to someone who was in the Christchurch CBD when it struck. Media friends were in the Christchurch Press building newsroom when huge chunks of masonry began crashing through the office roof like meteors. One of their staff has been killed. Others who were in the building, I understand, remain missing.

Sara McGlashan was in Cathedral Square with the White Ferns team when the quake struck and saw the iconic Cathedral steeple topple before her eyes. The rubble crashed within 50 metres of the team’s van, which they were all packing with their gear, about to head off to training for the Rose Bowl match that was meant to start today. Through the choking dust and stabbing sirens they could hear screaming and saw injured people trapped and terrified in what was left of the stonework.

Twenty-five kilometres away in the rural spread of Lincoln, the Australian team had had first use of the nets and at first didn’t realise the seriousness of the sudden ground-shaking beneath their feet. Then the text messages and phone calls began to come through from worried family members in Australia who had picked up the news and seen the alarming devastation on their television news. Immediately the Australian players’ attention turned to the Ferns’ safety in town and it was with huge relief that they were lucky enough to be able to make contact by cellphone relatively soon - networks had gone down completely for the first 20 minutes after the quake, before partial and patchy restoration.

Across the square, former Waikato Times sports reporter Matt Richens, who had taken up a new job in Christchurch just months earlier, had run out of the Press building with his dust-caked laptop and cellphone - he’d had the presence of mind to grab them so he could send out word. That was how the news of the big quake reached me: through Matt’s staccato Facebook reports, frantically typed on a dying battery as fire wardens ran around him in confusion.

“It started like so many of the thousands of aftershocks, but just got worse and worse and worse,” wrote Matt. “Windows exploded, walls started splitting and the noise was deafening. Lots of tears and hugs around from everyone. I saw comedian MIke King running and looked to be looking for someone. Nerves pretty well shot.”

“Just as everyone was outside, there was another huge quake and the top of the Press building fell off. It F*^&*% FELL OFF! Ground still shaking every minute or so.” ..... “Buildings all around have big holes in them” ..... “NZ women's cricket team in the square and look pretty shaken up” ..... “If anyone hears from my fiancée can they let me know if she's okay, I can't contact her” ..... “Another big aftershcok! [sic]”

Over at New Zealand Cricket headquarters in Hereford Street, there was high anxiety, too. Located close to major carnage in Cashel Mall and just across from the doomed Grand Chancellor hotel, one of their staff was unaccounted for. He’d gone on a lunchtime jog and, uncontactable, no one knew where he was, whether or not he was in the war zone of the CBD where buses and shoppers had been buried in debris.

Fortunately that story ended well, and Matt’s fiancée is OK, too (although many NZC staffers have lost their homes and the offices appear to be doomed). Several blocks away, however, the staff of the emergency department at Christchurch Public Hospital braced themselves for the stream of major trauma victims. One of my dear friends is a specialist in that department. I knew I had no hope of getting through to him to verify if he was all right - it was all hands on deck. One of the earliest media reports had said the hospital was being evacuated and triage centres being set up around town. I’ve since heard he operated through the day without being able to find out if his own three children were safe (they were). Northern Knight Bradley Scott’s sister-in-law is a nurse who was in the thick of it in the same emergency department. Everyone knows someone.

I know those buildings that we all saw on TV well - or knew them. I can walk around the CBD in my mind. I’ve stayed in those hotels. I’ve been in quakes before, but nothing on that scale. I’ve interviewed seismologists and geologists for in-depth features on earthquakes and like most of us outside the devastation zone I still can’t even begin to imagine what it was really like.

Here at Colin Maiden Park, and at Seddon Park this evening, it will continue to feel surreal. I still feel uneasy and distracted, even from the divide of distance. I look at Pete McGlashan and imagine the relief that flooded through his head when he heard Sara was shaken but alive and fine. Somehow the business of where we might be on the points table, or who is or isn’t in the team or at the World Cup seems insignificant now.

But we can try to do our bit in solidarity and tonight at the Titans International Twenty20 match all of the profits from putting on the event will be donated by Northern Districts Cricket to the Canterbury Relief Fund - so if you have the chance, please do get down to Seddon Park, help make it successful and support the cause. There will also be collections on the gate - a match programme in return for gold coins - and volunteers taking donation buckets through the crowd. Bradley Scott will be amongst them, one of the first to put his hand up to help, bless his pink socks.

Several Canterbury-based Titans players were already with us in Hamilton when the news of the quake came through. Understandably their primary thought was to rejoin their families in Christchurch: Craig McMillan and Nathan Astle have returned to what’s left of their city.

I mentioned that I’ve been in a few shakes before. You don’t grow up in Hawke’s Bay without being able to pick a rocker from a swayer, or without knowing the city’s sobering history. Until this week, the 1931 Napier earthquake was the most callous to have struck New Zealand and the fear now is that its death toll, 256, will be exceeded.

Dominating the entrance of the assembly hall at Napier Girls’ High (coincidentally, Sara McGlashan’s alma mater as well as mine) is a large mural by the late, famed artist Rita Angus; an artwork that was commissioned in 1960 to commemorate the girls killed in the 1931 shock. The original school building had to be demolished afterwards. Until recent renovations, the mural overlooked the assembly hall itself: generations of girls have stood under Angus’s pointed studies of the ruins of the earthquake, the new city that grew out of them, the landscape once again sun-brightened, the fresh faces and crisp blue uniforms of high school students front of canvas, signifying the hope for the future.

That’s now Christchurch’s challenge and Christchurch’s future, and we’ve all got to get behind its people as the journey back begins. And somehow get on with this special business of living.