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Broken city farewell adopted son

As Christchurch hosts Brendon McCullum's final Test, the event will also remember those affected by the 2011 earthquake

Brendan McCullum’s final outing as a New Zealand cricketer has justifiably dominated not just the build-up to the second Test starting in his adopted home city of Christchurch tomorrow, but has remained a celebratory narrative thread through Australia’s three-week tour here.

But as one whose ability to observe the broader picture often rivals his capacity to see and hit a cricket ball hurtling towards him, McCullum will not-altogether-happily tell you there is a far more significant milestone to be passed over the coming days at Hagley Oval.

That moment will arrive during the scheduled lunch break on day three of the match that will determine which nation will finish atop the world’s Test rankings, when Christchurch braces itself to be reminded of the cataclysm five years earlier that continues to shape its daily life.

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Cricket might well prove a welcome distraction for many Cantabrians who would prefer not to revisit the terror that arrived when a 6.3 magnitude earthquake centred barely 2km off the coast (and 5km below the surface) of neighbouring port town Lyttleton struck at lunch time on a summer’s Tuesday.

And the upheaval, unease and widespread dislocation it has left in its trembling wake.

For McCullum, who was in the Indian city of Nagpur as part of New Zealand’s 2011 ICC World Cup campaign when the 10-second quake slammed the city, and his fellow Black Caps players and fans, the memory of where they were and what has changed will never leave them.

For the Australia team, none of whom have played a Test match in New Zealand prior to this series and many of whom were not familiar with the Garden City before it was altered beyond recognition, reminders of nature’s force and life’s fragility stare unflinchingly back at them wherever they look.

"The security side of our team has given us a few pointers of what to do if there was a big earthquake," Australia captain Steve Smith said today when asked if there was discomfort within his team as they spend a week in the heart of Christchurch amid the constant accompaniment of aftershocks.

"And obviously on Monday it's five years since the big earthquake.

"I guess until you've been here it's hard to fathom what's actually happened in Christchurch, and you really feel for the people that experienced what went on five years go.

"It's a tough time for the people of Christchurch, obviously."

From their newly built, prefabricated concrete hotel on the eastern wing of the grid-patterned, parkland fringed city designed by the same surveyor who mapped out Adelaide, the Australians can gaze south past Castle Rock to where Lyttleton lies, slowly recovering, less than 10km on the other side.

In that line of sight is the haunting edifice of Lancaster Park, once the city’s cavernous rugby cathedral and home to the most recent Trans-Tasman cricket Test played here in 2005, now overrun with weeds and an eerily silent memorial to routines so radically transformed.

Image Id: ~/media/C5537BDA6B30442CB321ED934AAD0EFE Image Caption: Lancaster Park in 2005

The four-tier Hadlee Stand that honoured the city’s famous cricket family was so badly damaged it was levelled in 2012.

But the monstrous concrete monoliths lining opposite flanks of the abandoned playing field stand defiant and useless, having each dropped around 350mm due to the power of the quake.

And deemed beyond salvation because of the liquefaction that sent around half a million tonnes of water and silt gushing to the surface, which in itself has led to entire suburbs in the city’s once sprawling east being demolished with only backyard trees serving as headstones for families and aspirations forced elsewhere.

After arriving from Wellington on Wednesday afternoon, a number of the Australian players wandered the unnerving city centre that by day is home to crews finishing off the quake’s work or starting on the precinct’s rebuild.

Come evening, what was once Christchurch’s commercial and cultural heart is but a macabre movie set, devoid of life and landmarks with embryonic cubist structures taking shape amid the skeletal structural remains held in place by steel scaffolding or buttressed by building blocks of shipping containers.

Apart from the morbidly curious and mostly unnerved tourists trying to reconcile how this most picturesque and English city has so suddenly been rendered unrecognisable, or those attempting to imagine how it must once have looked without vacant lots and pop-up shops at every corner.

And if the cricketers, whose security protocols are among the most fastidious in world sport, needed any nudging as to the unspoken threat that hangs every day over Christchurch it came as they were tucking into their evening meals last night.

The 4.4 magnitude tremor that rumbled through the city at 7.17pm and rattled windows and dinner table cutlery for a few seconds, one of 20 aftershocks recorded that day in the wake of the previous Sunday’s 5.7 magnitude quake that raised anxiety levels heading into next week’s anniversary. 

"Obviously a little reminder of what Christchurch can serve up with the earthquakes over the last week or so," McCullum observed with a knowing smile at his Test-eve media conference today.

"I guess that’s the beauty of sport as well.

"We get to go out and give the people of Christchurch the ability to support their team and enjoy the occasion rather worrying about things rocking and rolling."

The venue for the Black Caps skipper’s farewell to a country that has similarly rallied behind him and his team is as understated as it is unlikely.

A vast expanse of grassland within the city’s beloved public park, Hagley Oval spends most of its year as a community playing field with a majority of the infrastructure needed to host a Test match – sightscreens, television towers, corporate entertainment suites, media facilities – trucked in and assembled from 48 hours before match day.

There were those who campaigned volubly against the establishment of permanent structures and security measures needed to provide international cricket with a permanent home in Christchurch, but NZ’s Environment Court ruled it legal in time for the inaugural Test to begin on Boxing Day 2014.

A day of raw emotion by stoic Cantabrian standards, which McCullum coloured with indelible ink by blasting 195 from just 134 balls to announce that not only did cricket have a new home on the South Island but that the national team had a leader who could bring his people with him.

Precisely the message the displaced and the disillusioned wanted to hear as they navigated their way through the seemingly endless legal, bureaucratic, logistical and social burdens that come with picking up a flattened community and rebuilding it stone by stone.

McCullum has not played a Test match in the city to which he relocated from the southern outpost of Dunedin in 2003 (along with his parents) since that post-Christmas celebration against Sri Lanka just over a year ago.

To imagine that he will lead the team that has become so utterly infused with his character and values to a Test match win over their most bitterly respected rivals, and that McCullum will sign off his international playing days with another innings of incandescence, is to risk believing in fairy tales. 

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But if there is a setting in which such a romantic endnote might be penned, it is the swathe of parkland on which a playing field has evolved into a symbol of a city’s resilience.

And if there was a hero for whom that script could be feasibly writ, it is 34-year-old McCullum who has shown his adopted home city how – from a rough but willing underpinning – great outcomes can be built.

"I've been lucky enough over the last 14 years to grow up from a 20-year-old quite brash person to hopefully what I am today which is, I believe, a better person," McCullum said in his final media conference as a current New Zealand cricketer.

"Everyone within the (Black Caps) group they would say the same thing about themselves as well.

"One thing we tried to really drill into our group is that it's not a right to play for your country, it's an absolute privilege and while you’ve got that opportunity you've got certain responsibilities that you've got to be able to uphold as well.

"And that's not just on the field, but off the field as well and I think that's probably one of the proudest things that we've seen with this team over the last couple of years – the development of good people in and around the organisation and the team.

"It’s nice to be able to go out in the purest form of the game, a game that means so much to cricketers who've played for New Zealand over decades.

"And to be able to do it in your home town there's an element of romance there as well, and it'll be nice.

"There are not too many players who have played for New Zealand in the last decade or two who have beaten Australia.

"To be able to do it at home would be pretty special, especially to do it to level the series as well.

"But there’s a long way to go before that result plays out.

"We're one-nil down in the series, we've got one Test to go and we've got to find a way to square the series.

"We've talked among the group, we thought we were probably too keen in the last Test match (in Wellington where Australia won by an innings and 52 runs).

"The focus for us in this Test match is to get back to what's worked for us in the last three years and that's going out there, playing with a lot of enthusiasm, a smile on our face and try and seize the key moments when they arise."

Taking a break from the rebuild that will stretch to the next five-year anniversary of the big quake and well beyond, the people of Christchurch could not order for a more uplifting or timely tonic.