Napier and Wellington lead Cricket World Cup crowds

Napier and Wellington lead Cricket World Cup crowds

10 March 2015

Napier is sitting in top spot as New Zealand’s most prolific cricket watching centre after its weekend’s Cricket World Cup clash between New Zealand and Afghanistan.

For more information and Statistics New Zealand's chart showing why Napier and Wellington’s New Zealand games have had the biggest crowds relative to their populations, see here, or keep reading below.

Cricket is a game of statistics, and we at Statistics New Zealand love cricket, and cricket statistics in particular.

Throughout the 2015 Cricket World Cup, Statistics NZ will be looking at crowd numbers at each of the matches held in New Zealand, and comparing them with the populations around the cricket grounds.

To make sure we’re comparing apples with apples, we’ve calculated the usually resident population living within 50km of each ground (less a few people in the Marlborough Sounds who are theoretically within 50km of the Stadium in Wellington, but we don’t think they are likely to swim to the ground).

There are many other things we’ve ignored – capacity of stadium and whether it was sold out, travelling fans, the likely performance of England’s cricketers etc.
In the chart below (or click the link below to view on our website), the size of the cricket ball shows the size of the crowd, a dark coloured ball shows New Zealand was playing, and the height of the ball shows the size of the crowd attendance at each game as a proportion of the local population – the higher the better.

So which is our top cricketing town?

This chart is available at http://www.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/population/NZ-biggest-cricket-fans.aspx

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