The Pink Report
Back to The Pink ReportNorthern Maori Represent!
This Thursday in Hamilton Northern Districts Cricket is planting a seed. For the first time an official Northern Maori team will come together to play cricket and the hope and intention is that it’s the beginning of something much bigger nationally.
Run your eye through the squad (below) and there are so many calibre players with local iwi affiliations that you’ll wonder why it hasn’t been done earlier. Were the Yahoo!Xtra Northern Knights not scheduled to be playing the Central Stags down in Napier on that same day, Pete McGlashan and the Boult brothers, Jono and Trent, would also be in the mix. And, through the years, there have been a number of other talented Maori players prominent within the ND fold - from test players Daryl Tuffey and Adam Parore to Te Ahu Davis, Dion Bennett, Brad Leonard, Mark Carrington, Roger Broughton and Nathan Daley - and that’s just amongst the blokes.
Parore (who sojourned himself to Northern Districts for a season after spending most of his career with Auckland) was frequently signposted by the media as ‘the first Maori to play cricket for New Zealand’, but actually there were women who beat him to that honour for the White Ferns - and whether any other male cricketers for New Zealand over the previous century had Maori ancestry is not - and may never be - clear.
Now, however, there’s a noticeable contingent coming up through the development system and achieving good things in the game. Many are great “natural athletes” in the eyes of Northern Maori player-coach Graeme Stewart (otherwise known as our Knights assistant coach and a Tainui bro himself) who in the past would probably have been lost to other sports somewhere along the way.
Take Tamati Clarke, for example - a 21-year-old left-hand batsman and slow bowler who was in the New Zealand Under-19 World Cup team captained by Kane Williamson. Tamati comes from a sterling sporting lineage: his father Te Rau Clarke, grandfather Rauhuia Reuben Clarke and uncle Teina Clarke were all Maori All Blacks, his netballing aunty Te Aroha Keenan (née Clarke) was a Silver Fern and his cousin Te Rina Keenan represented New Zealand in the discus at the 2007 Youth Olympics. His brother Haamiora has been selected alongside him in the Northern Maori side, too.
Tamati’s also pretty slick at rugby, the family say, but he’s been playing cricket since he was six, won a cricketing scholarship to Auckland’s St Kentigern College (Parore’s and Mark Richardson’s old school) when he was 12, got selected for the ND under-17s and under-19s and all those encouraging little carrots along the way have kept his ambitions focused on the summer game.
Which is basically the raison d’être behind the Northern Maori initiative. “It’s another level that players can strive towards and another system through which they can show their skills and endeavour to make the Northern Knights first-class side,” says Graeme Stewart. “It’s providing these players with another goal to help develop our talent.”
This isn’t the first time a Maori cricket XI has been inaugurated. In 2001, an ad hoc New Zealand Maori team was selected to play in the very first Pacifica Cup, which was being held in New Zealand and featured the likes of the Cook Islands national side, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Tonga, Samoa and so on. With players like our own Pete McGlashan (who has Ngati Porou whakapapa) and Jesse Ryder, New Zealand Maori stormed through to take the title - and haven’t been invited back since!
A rare old sepia photo in the Alexander Turnbull Library of the 1880 prefects’ cricket XI from Te Aute College (a Maori college in Hawke’s Bay) also proves that Maori have a connection with the game stretching back 131 years. But aside from the flicker of interest in the Pacifica Cup, there really hasn’t been any structure provided for Maori cricket either nationally or regionally, so far as anyone can remember, in all the years since.
So how did this Northern Districts idea germinate? Graeme and Northern Districts operations manager Pat Malcon started talking about it two seasons ago, spurred by the number of good young Maori players who were popping up all around the ND catchment.
“It’s something we want to get going in Northern Districts first of all and once we get Northern Maori up and running we’re interested in putting the word out to other domestic associations to see if they can also provide a Maori side, and maybe get together for a weekend. We’ll put the feelers out, but for now we thought we could get the ball rolling by at least putting together our own side and playing games within our district,” says Graeme.
The team will be playing their maiden one-day fixture against Waikato University, a strong unit in its own right featuring a number of Fergus Hickey, Northern Districts A and under-18 representatives. And (subject to confirmation at this stage) there are high hopes of a second fixture this season, a Twenty20 match against the touring Cook Islands national team at Seddon Park on April 1. Cook Islands, which has strong ties with Northern Districts Cricket, is visiting for a preseason camp and playing our Craigs Academy side before they head to a key tournament in Samoa.
Graeme: “I think it’s important that we do drive something like this and that we really encourage young Maori guys in the game. With all other sports - rugby’s the great example - New Zealand Maori are just so passionate about playing for their side. They have netball Maori tournaments, they have touch Maori tournaments and it’s something we can really take forward in cricket. Hopefully we can even get Maori TV involved, down the track - that’s where I would like it to go. I’m sure over a couple of years it will start to move forward, especially with the shorter format - that really allows us to tap into so many different schools and the young ones who enjoy the fireworks of Twenty20.”
It also makes sense given that there are already a number of New Zealand-based Pasifika teams playing cricket within Auckland - for instance, there’s a Samoan team that competes in Auckland’s Twenty20 Sunday league. And other teams dotted about that Graeme thinks would relish opportunities to compete against a Maori representative team - for instance, a number of Croatian national players are based in Auckland (note to self: a future topic in its own right).
And of course it would be nice to be able to select another New Zealand Maori side to play in the ICC East Asia-Pacific competition. “So Maori cricket is in its infancy within the domestic scene, but hopefully in growing this we can get the ball rolling,” Graeme reiterates. “Nationally, I’ve spoken to a couple of players in Wellington who are very keen, and in this Northern Maori selection we’ve actually included a player contracted to the Auckland Aces (Dusan Hakaraia, who may well also be the first domestic cricketer in New Zealand to have been born in Hawaii).
The team’s history-making game starts at 11am this Thursday (March 24) on the University 1 ground at Waikato University. Graeme: “It will be a real great occasion and we’ll be having a bit of a get-together and welcome at the marae beforehand at the University, a karanga - and I think then that it will hit us that this is a really exciting moment for Maori cricket."