Nicholas Brendan Beard (born 16 September 1989) is a New Zealand former professional

cricket Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of eleven players on a field at the centre of which is a pitch with a wicket at each end, each comprising two bails balanced on three stumps. The batting side scores runs by str ...

er. He played as a left-handed batsman and left-arm slow bowler for Otago. He was born at

Dunedin Dunedin ( ; mi, Ōtepoti) is the second-largest city in the South Island of New Zealand (after Christchurch), and the principal city of the Otago region. Its name comes from , the Scottish Gaelic name for Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. Th ...

and educated at

Kavanagh College , motto_translation = With Her As Our Guide , type = State-integrated secondary , established = 1989; years ago (antecedent secondary schools: 1871, 1876, 1878, 1897 and 1976) , streetaddress ...

. Beard played for the New Zealand under-19 side at the

2008 Under-19 Cricket World Cup The 2008 ICC Under-19 Cricket World Cup was held in Malaysia from 17 February 2008 to 2 March 2008. The opening ceremony took place on 15 February 2008. The final was played between South Africa and India, which India won by 12 runs on the Duckw ...

, playing in two warm-up matches and five Youth One Day International matches during the competition.Nick Beard
CricketArchive. Retrieved 4 January 2022. He went on to make two Youth Test appearances and two further Youth One Day International appearances against the England under-19 side on the side's 2008 tour of England. Having first played for Otago's Second XI in January 2009, Beard made his

first-class cricket First-class cricket, along with List A cricket and Twenty20 cricket, is one of the highest-standard forms of cricket. A first-class match is one of three or more days' scheduled duration between two sides of eleven players each and is officia ...

debut two months later for the side, against

Auckland Auckland (pronounced ) ( mi, Tāmaki Makaurau) is a large metropolitan city in the North Island of New Zealand. The most populous urban area in the country and the fifth largest city in Oceania, Auckland has an urban population of about ...

. He took his career best innings bowling figure of six wickets for 107 runs against Auckland in March 2010 and played for a New Zealand emerging players side later in the year before touring Zimbabwe with the New Zealand A side in October. Beard took his best

Twenty20 cricket Twenty20 (T20) is a shortened game format of cricket. At the professional level, it was introduced by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) in 2003 for the inter-county competition. In a Twenty20 game, the two teams have a single innin ...

bowling figures of 4/16 against

Wellington Wellington ( mi, Te Whanganui-a-Tara or ) is the capital city of New Zealand. It is located at the south-western tip of the North Island, between Cook Strait and the Remutaka Range. Wellington is the second-largest city in New Zealand by metr ...

in December 2012 and later in the same season scored his only first-class century. Batting as a nightwatchman he made 188 runs against Auckland in February 2013, and innings that included 31 fours and one six and was described as "remarkable" by CricInfo. His previous highest score of 62, and only other score in excess of 50 runs, had been made in 2010. By the 2014–15 season however, Beard's bowling action was under scrutiny. He remodelled his action and was cleared to bowl again ahead of the 2015–16 season but experience more problems with his action during the season. Beard had already qualified to trade as a real estate agent and initially planned to take some time away from cricket whilst working in that industry. He played his last matches for Otago during the 2015–16 Plunket Shield and later chose to retire from cricket and become a full-time real estate agent.My Story
Nick Beard Real Estate Agent. Retrieved 5 January 2022.

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* {{DEFAULTSORT:Beard, Nick 1989 births Living people New Zealand cricketers Otago cricketers People educated at Trinity Catholic College, Dunedin South Island cricketers