Sideline Sid Sports correspondant & historian www.sunlive.co.nz

Sideline Sid has found a great way to fix the stresses and strains of the build-up to the busiest time of the year.

Last weekend, along with Mrs Sid, he sat on the bank at Seddon Park in Hamilton, for the first two days of the Black Caps' second test with Sri Lanka.

Having breakfast in a little cafe in Hamilton East on Saturday morning, Sideline Sid spied a piece in the Waikato daily rag, where the writer speculated that the Bay Oval at Mount Maunganui could be in line to host a test match against Pakistan or Bangladesh late next year.

While he advanced his reasons for a test match at the Mount, it took this writer back to the cricket scene when he first arrived in Mount Maunganui in 1967.

Some 50 years ago the Mount was no more than a sleepy seaside town, with around 8,000 permanent residents if you threw in the narrow strips of houses along Papamoa Beach Road.

The Mount Maunganui Cricket Club website says that the club was formed in the late 1960s, and it is likely that they played on the current rugby field.

In the early 1970s, the Mount RSA cricket team used to mow a strip across the road from where the Mount Rugby club now sits. The RSA side used to play Sunday social matches against teams drawn from the Tauranga and Mount hotels and occasionally visiting naval ships.

However, cricket was played in the Mount much earlier than the 1960s, with this writer having a photograph taken of a Mount Maunganui cricket team in 1923.

The names on the back of the photo are listed as Kelly, Fairclough x 2, Macdonald, Dodd, Chitty, Newling, Wilson, Morris, Hull, Jeffares, Baker and O'Driscoll.

While people's perception of test cricket is that it's often boring, with long periods of nothing happening, there was non-stop action for the three-and-a-bit days of the test in the Tron.

The best part of test cricket is the glorious uncertainty of the result that four innings will produce.

New Zealand raised a few eyebrows when they won the toss and elected to bowl first, as the usual tack of captain Brendon McCullum is to blaze away with the bat if given the option.

The visitors lost some early wickets, before going on to post a first innings target of near 300 runs.

You could hear the audible sounds of despair from crowd, as the New Zealand top order came and went in quick succession, in their first turn at bat.

At 4/89, the Sri Lanka side was well and truly in charge. However the Black Caps fought back and ended the first half of the match in with a chance, with a deficit of nearly 60 runs.

Sri Lanka again grabbed the momentum when they were 70 without loss, before a superb catch and a run-out from the Bay of Plenty's Trent Boult put the Caps back in the match, as Sri Lanka were bundled out for just 133 in their second innings.

Needing 188 to win, Bay of Plenty superhero Kane Williamson steered the Black Caps home with a hard fought century, to a victory that looked unlikely at various stages of the match.

It just leaves me to wish all SunLive readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, and we will catch you in early January 2016.