I absolutely love going to watch games live at the stadium. I probably have been to more games than I have been to concerts. On the 16th of February, there was a T20 game between the Blackcaps and Australia as part of the tri-series. My friends and I had tickets to go to the game. One good thing about going to sporting events and/or sometimes concerts is that travel on trains is included on your tickets and you don’t have to pay for your fare separately. This is a great way to avoid any irresponsible people drinking and driving or in general driving rashly. There’s hardly ever any parking close to the stadium which in a way forces you to rely on public transport. Anyway, back to my story.

The T20 between the Blackcaps and Australia was set to start at 7pm and with work finishing at 5pm we had two hours to get there. You may think that is ample time to get there, but at peak 5pm traffic, it’s anything but. There were 6 of us who were headed to the game and we went in two lots – a group of 4 and a group of 2. I went with the group of 4. This is our story of how we made it to the cricket, feel free to laugh at our misery. We were all determined to get to the stadium and be at our seats before the first ball. We set off from the office and first made our way southeast to a suburb called Ellerslie, so one of our colleagues could drop his car off and the plan was to take the train from Ellerslie first. We managed to do this in record time but unfortunately missed the earlier train that was waiting at the platform when we arrived.

We had to change trains from Newmarket, which is a suburb in central Auckland. The train from Ellerslie to Newmarket was very empty and took us 15 minutes to get there. This is when things get real. We had to get on to a train on the western line from Newmarket and it was going to be roughly a 15 minute journey to Kingsland, which is where Eden Park is. Out of the 4 of us, 3 of us knew that these trains were going to be packed. We made our way and found the perfect spot to wait at and jump on to the train once it got there. The fourth person, not naming names, as I know this person will be reading the blog, struggled to get on the train. So, we couldn’t get on the first train that got there. Ten minutes later the next train arrived, which was more packed than the first one and there was absolutely no way we could get on. By this point it was already 6:45pm. We knew there was no way we could make it to the stadium on time, yet we remained hopeful. Once we missed the second train too, we decided that the best way for us to get there would be to Uber and so we did.

We got to the stadium 10 minutes past 7 and missed the first over. I laughed internally at taking an Uber at the last minute, because when planning the logistics of getting to the game, I had suggested that we take an Uber right from the office. But hey, it was still an enjoyable game even though the Blackcaps lost and we missed the first over. We did still bump into Guy Williams, a New Zealand stand-up comedian for what it’s worth. So yay!

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Until next time,

MiliG