Requiem for a Cricket Ground
GH on a vanishing beauty spot
A turf cricket pitch is a beautiful sight. It is compounded of soil, grass, patience, skill and hope. It reminds us that ours is a game in nature, in harmony with the seasons. It widens variety and introduces chance, enhancing cricket’s metaphorical connection to daily life. When you dig it up, you’re killing a living thing. Something that looks like this.
Welcome to Crawford Oval. It’s a pretty, tree-fringed ground that’s hosted cricket and football for almost seventy years. Back in the day, we used to play Melbourne University here. Now it’s the home ground of our friends Indigos CC, a largely south Asian club founded in 2007 and ‘bound by passion, driven by cricket’; they co-habit with a smaller, newer club, also largely South Asian, the Melbourne Falcons. But no longer: the turf table will go under the plough imminently.
Why? ‘Inclusivity’, pronounce the City of Melbourne: ‘This will transform the oval into a multipurpose sports field – catering for a wider range of sporting activities.’ Yet it’s multipurpose already. Cricket uses the ground on Saturday afternoons. Otherwise it’s open slather. Want to play your game of touch or six-a-side football? Want to walk your dog or throw your frisbee? Knock yourselves out. Nobody, in fact, can explain how a turf square is a hindrance to anything. Cricket’s imprint is as light as its benefit is great. Think of the welcome that Crawford Oval has afforded young Indian guys arriving in Melbourne over the last decade. To be able to walk straight into a like-minded community in a picturesque location must have seemed borderline miraculous.
So what’s the deal? One can only assume that City of Melbourne hates cricket - just as maybe your city and town does too. They assuredly see turf wickets as requiring care and maintenance unjustified in this financially exigent day and age - it’s certainly more lucrative to let fields to for-profit organisers of ‘social sports’ like futsal and tag rugby. In this view, moreover, they receive support from surprising quarters. After I briefly mentioned this development on Offsiders yesterday, my erstwhile colleague Stephen Mayne had this to say on X:
Yet what’s ridiculous about it? Cricket is prospering in the inner city, with our association, the Mercantile, doubling in size in the last fifteen years. Isn’t that a good thing? Over the same period, the City has dug up seven squares, leaving fourteen available for park cricket, rendering Stephen’s figures out of date. How does that make sense? I also can’t wait to tell all the ‘entitled white men’ at Indigos and Falcons how they’re benefiting from an ‘expensive sporting indulgence.’ At least half the cricketers in our association would now be South Asian. But don’t let that stop you indulging in your jaded cricket tropes….
At risk of repeating myself: the provision of amenity for community sport is an investment not a cost. What about the huge volunteer effort that cricket activates? What about the contribution to - that vogueish expression - social cohesion? As for the last point, why not provide more tables so the turf opportunities of women and girls are widened? I know: crazy, right? And much as I like Stephen - we go back many years - this is beneath him:
Well, presume away, old pal. But the boring reality is that precisely nobody asked me to do anything, least of all via the commercial juggernaut that is Cricket Et Al. I’ve played grass roots cricket fifty years, thirty of them at the club whose committee I still serve on, whose pavilion I just helped clean out, whose presentation I’ll be hosting this weekend. In cricket’s name, nobody need lobby me for anything; I also like reminding viewers that ninety-nine per cent of sport is not elite, although we spend almost all our time circle jerking about the one per cent that is. I’m a City of Melbourne ratepayer who always enjoyed playing on Crawford Oval - wouldn’t you? As for ‘undermining trust in government’….ahem, I don’t think mayor Nicholas Reece needs my help on that front. I notice he’s launching a book at the Menzies Institute on Wednesday night.
Say what you like about Australia’s longest serving prime minister, Sir Robert would not have been party to the annihilation of a historic cricket ground closely connected to his university alma mater. He spoke of the game as evoking a ‘feeling in the heart and mind and the eye which neither time nor chance can utterly destroy.’ What a pity the City of Melbourne doesn’t feel it. Farewell, then, cricket at Crawford Oval….
…and farewell your well-used and lovingly-tended pitch, with all its attendant memories.
I loved that ground - had a ball and many fond memories playing Uni 3rds and 4ths there. It was especially beneficially to a cricketer like me who hated the quicks because it never bounced above shin height. You can say what you like about the MUCC but those boys could sledge with panache.
However, What a bunch of numb nut dick puppetry has gone into the thinking around removing turf wickets. In the last thirty years of playing on turf the opposition was more varied in terms of race, orientation location and demographics than the city itself. And that's saying something isnt it?
Very well said, Gideon.
Local governments, especially, will complain about the ‘cost’ and ‘imposition’ of providing facilities for local sporting clubs, while also complaining about the costs associated with youth crime, vandalism, graffiti etc. Imagine how much worse the latter issues would be without sporting clubs!
Note: our club pays a curator $300 per week during the season to ensure our wicket is top-notch. With no council assistance whatsoever - apart from providing the facilities!