Rupert Peter Owens Drysdale (born 7 January 1989) is a New Zealand cricketer who plays for Bay of Plenty and Northern Districts.^[1][2] After playing for the Bay of Plenty team in the Hawke Cup since the 2009/10 cricket season,^[3] Drysdale made his first-class cricket debut for Northern Districts in April 2022, in the penultimate match of the 2021–22 Plunket Shield season.^[4] Due to an outbreak of COVID-19 within the team, seven players made their first-class debuts for the team in the same match, with Drysdale doing so at the age of 33.^[5]

Drysdale was born in Forest Row, East Sussex, England in 1989,^[3] and now lives in Tauranga, New Zealand.^[5] He is the younger brother of New Zealand rower Mahé Drysdale,^[5] who has won two gold medals and a bronze at three different editions of the Olympic Games.^[6]

Drysdale has played cricket in England, featuring for the second XI for both Derbyshire and Leicestershire during the 2014 and 2015 summers respectively.^[3] In 2014, Drysdale also played in the Huddersfield Cricket League in West Yorkshire, England, for Scholes cricket team.^[7]

In October 2014, Drysdale became the eleventh cricketer for Bay of Plenty to play in fifty matches for the team.^[8] Five years later, in December 2019, Drysdale was only the third cricketer for the team to feature in one hundred matches for the side.^[9] In his 100 matches for the team, Drysdale had scored more than 3,000 runs, including three centuries, and had taken 24 wickets.^[10] Drysdale had also captained the team during five seasons of the Hawke Cup.^[10]

Drysdale was originally scheduled to make his first-class debut for Northern Districts against Auckland in March 2020, during the 2019–20 Plunket Shield season.^[5] However, the final two rounds of that tournament were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.^[11]

In April 2022, Northern Districts' penultimate match of the 2021–22 Plunket Shield season, against Central Districts, was abandoned on the fourth and final day after multiple cases of COVID-19 were reported within their squad.^[12] Six days later, Northern Districts played their final round-robin match of the 2021–22 Plunket Shield season, against Wellington.^[4] Due to the number of COVID-19 cases within the squad,^[13] Northern Districts had nineteen players unavailable for their final match of the season.^[5] Drysdale, at the age of 33, made his first-class cricket debut in the match.^[5] Also making their debuts alongside Drysdale were Ben Pomare, Chris Swanson, Fergus Lellman, Josh Brown, Sam Varcoe and Sandeep Patel.^[4] It was the highest number of debutants in the same match for Northern Districts since their inaugural first-class fixture in 1956.^[14] In the first innings of the match, Drysdale only scored five runs, before he was dismissed leg before wicket (lbw) by Nathan Smith.^[4] On making his debut, Drysdale said it was a great opportunity, but he was mindful of the cricketers in his team who had missed out, as several of them were very ill.^[5] In the second innings, Drysdale top-scored for Northern Districts with 62 runs, but the team were all out for 161 runs.^[4] With a target of just 54 runs to win the match, Wellington went on to win by nine wickets, with Drysdale taking the one wicket, that of opener Devan Vishvaka.^[4]