New Zealand Cricket's Pacific Island Connections

On a Saturday in summer in south Auckland or west Sydney you can find a version of cricket being played that has two wicketkeepers, teams of fifteen or more, a bat carved to the owner's preference and a drummer keeping time. It is called kilikiti in Samoa, kirikiti in some Pacific spellings, and it is the national sport of Samoa. It is not a variant of cricket in the sense that Twenty20 is a variant. It is a separate game that took cricket as raw material.

That game is played by tens of thousands of people in New Zealand. New Zealand's professional cricket, meanwhile, has produced very few players of Pacific descent — two of any real prominence in the whole professional era. The gap between those two facts is the subject of this page.

The relationship is older and more complicated than a development-programme brochure suggests. Fiji was playing organised cricket and touring before New Zealand had a Test side. Samoa's cricket board is coached and administered partly by people who learned the game in Auckland. And in 2025 the second-highest run scorer in New Zealand's international history put on a Samoa shirt in a World Cup qualifier.

The game the missionaries lost control of

English missionaries and seafarers took cricket to Samoa in the nineteenth century. What came back was not the game they had brought.

Samoan players kept the bat, ball and stumps and altered nearly everything else. Teams grew to whatever size the village could field, often ten to twenty a side, with women, children and elders included. Two wicketkeepers became standard. The bat was reshaped on the model of the three-sided Samoan war club, the lapalapa, wrapped in sennit and often more than a metre long, which changes the geometry of batting entirely. Singing, drumming and chanting run through a match.

Colonial administrators periodically tried to restrict it, on the grounds that it consumed too much of the working week. It survived all of that, spread across Polynesia, and travelled with Pacific migration to New Zealand and Australia in the twentieth century. The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa holds kilikiti bats and documents the game as a Pacific cultural form rather than a curiosity.

Two things follow for New Zealand cricket. The first is that Pasifika communities in New Zealand are not unfamiliar with bat-and-ball sport; the assumption that they need introducing to it is wrong. The second is that kilikiti and club cricket are organised on completely different social terms — one around extended family and church, the other around a subscription, a Saturday-long time commitment and a clubhouse. The New Zealand club cricket system was not designed with the first arrangement in mind.

How it is organised in New Zealand

Kilikiti in New Zealand is run through associations and, more importantly, through churches. The Counties Manukau Kirikiti Association is the best-known body, and the calendar's centrepiece in south Auckland is a Church of Origin tournament held in the new year, in which hundreds of players turn out for their congregations rather than for clubs. Women's teams were added to that competition comparatively recently and have become one of its fastest-growing parts.

Tournaments also run in Wellington and Tauranga, and the game features at the Pasifika Festival in Auckland. The organising unit is the family and the church, the season is short, and there is no promotion or relegation to worry about. Anyone assuming that hard-ball club cricket is the natural upgrade from this has misread what the participants are there for.

Fiji got there first

Fiji has the longest continuous cricket history in the Pacific and, for a period, a formal relationship with New Zealand cricket that Samoa never had.

A Fijian side toured New Zealand in 1895 — a party of European settlers and Fijian chiefs, which won four of its matches, drew two and lost two. That is thirty-five years before New Zealand played its first Test. The Fiji Cricket Association was founded in 1946 by Philip Snow, who then represented Fiji at the International Cricket Conference for three decades. When the ICC took its modern name in 1965, Fiji was admitted as an associate member in the same intake as Ceylon and the United States.

Fiji's cricket has since been overtaken domestically by rugby to a degree that has few parallels anywhere, and its national side plays in the East Asia-Pacific qualifying structure rather than against New Zealand. But the 1895 tour is a reminder that the Pacific connection is not a recent development initiative. It predates almost everything else in New Zealand's cricket calendar, including the arrival of Test cricket described in the origins of cricket in New Zealand.

Murphy Su'a

The first cricketer of Samoan descent to play Test cricket for New Zealand was Murphy Su'a, a left-arm fast-medium bowler born in 1966 to Samoan parents.

Su'a played thirteen Tests and twelve one-day internationals between 1992 and 1995. His career took off after he left Northern Districts for Auckland, taking 28 first-class wickets in nine matches in the 1990-91 season, and he was picked against England the following summer. His best Test return was five for 73 against Pakistan at Hamilton in January 1993. He toured Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka successfully.

He later coached the Samoa national side, which makes him one of the few figures who has worked on both ends of the relationship. He has also spoken publicly about racist abuse from a team-mate during his playing career, which is part of the record and is relevant to any honest account of why the pathway has been narrow.

New Zealand's left-arm seam tradition, which Su'a belongs to and which the guide to left-arm seam bowlers covers in detail, has generally been treated as a technical story about angle and swing. Su'a's place in it is rarely framed as a Pacific story, and he has said he would have liked it to be.

Ross Taylor's two names

Luteru Ross Poutoa Lote Taylor played 112 Tests and more than 450 matches in all formats for New Zealand. Only Kane Williamson has scored more international runs for the country. His mother was born in Samoa, in the village of Saoluafata on Upolu, and Taylor holds a Samoan matai title.

For most of his career that heritage was, in his own account, barely mentioned. He has said he grew up knowing that island children were not expected to play cricket, and that he would have liked New Zealand Cricket to make more of him as a Pasifika role model while he was still playing. It is an unusual complaint from a senior player and it was not made bitterly, but it is specific: the pathway existed, one person had walked it, and nobody used that.

Taylor's own long career, and the New Zealand sides he played in, are part of the story told in the guide to New Zealand's underdog cricket identity. His career record sits in the player index.

Why the professional pathway stayed narrow

Several explanations get offered, and they are not mutually exclusive.

• Competition from rugby codes. Rugby union and rugby league recruit hard, early and visibly in Pasifika communities, with school and academy structures that identify a promising fifteen-year-old and put a pathway in front of him. Cricket's equivalent, described in the school cricket pathway, has historically drawn from a narrower set of schools.
• Cost and time. A full club cricket commitment is expensive in equipment and consumes most of a Saturday for six months. Kilikiti is cheaper and shorter and does not require a subscription.
• Absence of visible precedent. With one Test bowler in the 1990s and one batter in the 2000s and 2010s, the sport has offered very little evidence to a Samoan or Tongan family in Auckland that this is a career.
• Geography. New Zealand's strongest club structures are not concentrated in the suburbs with the largest Pasifika populations. What that means in practice for Auckland's district clubs is set out in the guide to cricket in Auckland.

None of this is a story about ability. It is a story about the shape of a pathway, and pathways can be redesigned.

Auckland Cricket and Cricket Samoa

The most concrete institutional link runs through the ICC East Asia-Pacific development structure, which pairs a member association with a developing one. Auckland Cricket has been partnered with Cricket Samoa under that programme, sharing coaching, competition exposure and administrative support.

The wider regional grouping is broad and unusual: East Asia-Pacific covers Australia and New Zealand alongside Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Samoa, Vanuatu, the Cook Islands, Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines and South Korea. In practice that means New Zealand and Australia are full members sitting in a region whose other sides play associate cricket, so the relationship is inevitably one of resource transfer rather than fixtures.

Regional competition has grown around it. The Pacific Island Cricket Challenge was held in Suva in 2023 with men's and women's teams from Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Vanuatu and a combined Australian and New Zealand defence-force side. A women's Twenty20 Pacific Cup in 2024 brought Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Vanuatu, Fiji and the Cook Islands together with a New Zealand Māori side — the same programme discussed in the guide to Māori cricketers.

Vanuatu has been the standout riser of the group in the shortest format. Papua New Guinea, the strongest cricket nation in the Pacific by a distance, has reached a men's Twenty20 World Cup.

October 2025, Al Amerat

The neatest expression of the whole relationship came in Oman.

Taylor had retired from international cricket in April 2022. Under ICC eligibility rules a player who has represented one member can qualify for another after a stand-down period, and Taylor was eligible for Samoa through his mother. Three years on, he was named in the Samoa squad for the ICC Men's T20 World Cup Asia and East Asia-Pacific Qualifier, played in October 2025 at Al Amerat.

Samoa lost the opening match to Oman, Taylor making 22 in a total of 92 for nine, and did not qualify. Samoa also met Papua New Guinea, Japan and Qatar in the tournament. The cricket was not the point. A player with 112 Tests behind him choosing to play associate qualifying cricket for his mother's country, at that stage of his life, did more for the visibility of Pacific cricket than a decade of development statements.

What would actually change it

The honest answer is that nothing in New Zealand cricket has yet changed the underlying pattern, and the people running the game there say so. Participation initiatives in south and west Auckland have run for years. Scholarships exist. Kilikiti tournaments and hard-ball cricket remain largely separate worlds.

What has changed is that the argument is now made openly, including by former players, and that the regional structure gives a talented Samoan or Fijian teenager somewhere to play international cricket without moving countries. Whether the next Pasifika Test cricketer for New Zealand comes through an Auckland club or through Cricket Samoa is an open question, and either would be an improvement on the present rate.

How the whole system is governed is covered in New Zealand's cricket structure, the game's spread beyond the traditional nations in cricket around the world, and the rest of the New Zealand game on the cricket in New Zealand hub.

Sources and method

This page rests on ICC membership and development material for the East Asia-Pacific region, published records of the 2023 Pacific Island Cricket Challenge and the 2025 Asia and East Asia-Pacific World Cup qualifier, Cricket Fiji's own account of its founding and associate membership, Te Papa's collection documentation of kilikiti, and New Zealand and Pacific media reporting of Murphy Su'a's and Ross Taylor's careers and of both men's comments about Pacific representation. Career figures for the players named are drawn from published match records rather than computed here. Participation comparisons between kilikiti and club cricket are descriptive; no attempt is made to give registered-player counts, which are not published consistently.