Given the extraordinary amount of cricket that has taken place in England over the past year, I’ve grown accustomed to a certain style of cricket ground.

Lords, Old Trafford, Edgbaston, and The Oval all have capacities well over the 20,000, mimicking a football stadium in a certain sense. Hell, the amount of steps I had to climb to get to the top of the Party Stand in the Fourth Test of The Ashes is a big step up from the fifteen benches scattered around the edge of my local club.

But now winter has arrived and the English pitches will be used only for snowball fights or dog walking, my attention has turned to grounds in the Southern Hemisphere- mainly those in New Zealand.

What immediately struck me as different about New Zealand’s two grounds used in the opening two tests against England is the ‘village green-styled’ seating around the pitches. Both the Bay Oval and Seddon Park lack the traditional seating most stadiums in England have, opting instead for a grassy embankment where fans can sit, stand, or sunbathe whilst watching England lose another test series.

Immediately, I became immensely jealous at the prospect of having the space to lie down and watch Colin de Grandhomme mysteriously tear apart England’s batsmen once again. My experiences at cricket grounds are filled with memories of cramped seating and spilled drinks, so being able to spread out and essentially have a picnic whilst world-class cricketers are just a few metres away seems like a fantastic experience.

Would this work in England? Probably not.

As I mentioned earlier, English stadiums seat over 20,000 fans, and so giving each of them the space to lie down would probably not be feasible without seriously reducing the capacity of stadiums. It’s already hard enough to buy tickets to international cricket fixtures, especially given the sheer number of tickets reserved for corporate sponsors.

Even if I managed to buy a ticket, it’s unlikely that the experience would mirror that in New Zealand. English weather is infamously unreliable. I can’t imagine anything worse than sitting on a wet blanket in the pouring rain, hoping play will resume shortly.

It’s probably for the best we don’t have these types of stadiums in the UK. British holidaymakers are notorious for their awful beach etiquette, and this would carry over into cricket grounds. Images of cramped sun loungers, saving spaces with towels, and screaming children would soon replace the ideal in my head of a luxury cricketing experience, and I don’t know if I’m ready to let go of that any time soon.