It was fitting that Heath Streak scored the Rose Bowl's first international fifty.

Streak used to be the Bransgrove family's babysitter when, as a 21-year-old, he spent the 1995 season as Hampshire's overseas player.

But, in his former county's new home, he ensured that the Rose Bowl's first international match represented something of a contest.

Streak had never played a match in Hampshire since his one season of county cricket until scoring an unbeaten fifty from 90 balls yesterday

It at least made amends for electing to bat on winning the toss. The last group match in the Natwest Series threatened to be over by mid- afternoon when man of the match Makhaya Ntini ripped through the Zimbabweans' top order, taking three wickets in the first four overs.

The bad news from the Rose Bowl's point of view was the early seam movement with the new Kookaburra ball but Streak capitalised as it wore older, taking his side to a respectable 173-8 and reaching his ninth one day international fifty in the final over, having arrived with the Zimbabweans a perilous 74-6.

Streak's old Hampshire friends would no doubt have preferred him to have asked the South Africans to bat first as Graeme Smith's side won with 15 overs to spare.

But his unbroken 42-run stand with Ray Price ensured that the Zimbabweans batted for their full allocation of 50 overs - time that helped provide extra revenue for the Rose Bowl on a day when it enjoyed another financial boost.

An early two-wicket burst from the impressive Douglas Hondo gave the Zimbabweans more hope but a 137-run partnership between Smith and Jacques Rudolph earned the finalists a comfortable seven-wicket win.

But what happened on the pitch was never as important as how the club coped off it, and the general consensus was that the Rose Bowl had a blinder.

Having two sides that offered colour and life in South Africa and Zimbabwe certainly helped.

Rose Bowl regulars are used to watching the Hampshire Hawks play in all black and when the Sussex Sharks arrived in a similarly funereal strip for the opening Twenty20 match last month, you could not help but feel that cricket had missed a trick.

The sea of Saints' yellow and blue at the FA Cup final showed what a difference colour can make to a sporting occasion as did the green and yellow of South Africa, the Rainbow Nation, and the red, yellow and green of Zimbabwe yesterday.

A healthy contingent of national flags and replica shirts was evidence of a partisan crowd - so much for a dead game.

With national pride at stake - before play Streak compared the fixture to New Zealand versus Australia - neither side was expected to go through the motions.

And as a visual spectacle, the game offered plenty.

Hampshire's cricket-loving public have already shown that, dead rubber or not, they will turn up at West End in their droves when the sun is shining and big names are on show (nearly 7,000 turned up at the Rose Bowl to watch Surrey beat the Hawks in the Twenty20 last month).

Yesterday the same formula of sun and stars helped ensure that Zimbabwe and South Africa attracted a bigger crowd to the Rose Bowl than when the two countries played each other earlier in the Natwest Series at Canterbury and Cardiff.

Jacques Kallis might have been missing from South Africa's line up but big name players like Herschelle Gibbs, Shaun Pollock and Ntini were still on show, not to mention two players who will surely establish themselves in Test cricket's constellation in Smith and Rudolph.

For the locals in the crowd it was a joy to be able to watch the Rose Bowl's first international just nine months after St Mary's hosted England v Macedonia.

Bransgrove and Saints chairman Rupert Lowe, who watched the action from a hospitality tent yesterday, have done south coast sport proud in recent years.

But Rose Bowl plc chairman Bransgrove is not ready to sit back yet. He wants an England fixture at the Rose Bowl in 2005 (the West Indies and New Zealand play here next year) and Test cricket by 2008.

There is still work to be done but ground sponsorship will help the Rose Bowl to bear even more of a resemblance to the drawings of award-winning architect Michael Hopkins.

Then it will be the Test arena that it was always intended to be, but a lot has already happened since former captain Mark Nicholas, ex-president Wilfrid Weld and Bill Hughes, the former vice chairman, first discussed moving from Northlands Road 16 years ago.