New Zealand Ambassadors beat Missouri Cricket Association A at Forest Park

Forest Park once hosted New Zealand Ambassadors and Missouri Cricket Association A in a one-day single-innings match on 24 May 1970, and the visitors left with a 115-run win. BG Hadlee’s 58 and JFM Morrison’s unbeaten 40 turned the innings into a statement, not just a stopover, and the scorecard still reads like proof that St. Louis sat on an international cricket route.

That match was not isolated. CricketArchive’s Forest Park ground record lists dozens of other matches at the St. Louis venue, including 26 in one archive view and 58 miscellaneous matches in another, and a St. Louis Post-Dispatch clipping shows Kutis and Prince Gardner meeting there in Missouri Cricket Association league play. Another clipping places the Forest Park cricket field in the association’s season, and the Missouri Cricket Association was active enough in 1970 to hold its annual business meeting and elect officers including Bill Tatlock, George Wallace, RW Fulton, GA Newdick, P Flaherty, ADG Roberts and RB Sandford.

The New Zealand Ambassadors were also traveling on a serious circuit. Their 1970 world tour ran through Santiago, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Lima, Louisville, Finchley and Gibraltar, which puts Forest Park inside a broader itinerary that reached across the Americas and beyond. That matters because it shows Missouri was not simply hosting neighborhood cricket; it was hosting a touring side with recognizable players and a formal scorecard trail.

Forest Park itself gave that cricket a public stage. The park was established in 1874 and officially opened in 1876, and it remains one of St. Louis’s major civic spaces under the city’s park system and Forest Park Forever. Later accounts have described a cricket lane there and recalled teams from India, England and Australia coming to play, which fits the longer record of a ground that served both local league cricket and outside visitors.

That is the clearest then-vs-now contrast Missouri cricket faces. The old setup had a working venue, an organized association, regular league fixtures and enough credibility to place an international touring side on the calendar. Forest Park shows the template Missouri clubs would need today for another touring exhibition, youth showcase or sanctioned marquee match: a public ground ready for cricket, an association able to organize it and official backing strong enough to make the invitation real.