A cricket ground to be proud of in Euroa

Cricket has a renovated home in a Victorian country town as TLC brings the Friendlies ground back to life.

After a huge fundraising effort and plenty of hard work, Peter Morley, right, and Rob Asquith with members of the club’s junior cricket squad are ready to take on all-comers at the rejuvenated Friendlies ground. Picture: Aaron Francis

It’s 16 years since Rob Asquith of Euroa, halfway between Melbourne and Albury in country Victoria, played his last game of cricket. He was 64. He still misses it. “I’d play it seven days a week if I could,” he says. But it was time. Besides, his wife Bev had told him she was sick of washing his whites.

Still, there’s no harm looking, is there? Like millions of Australians, he’ll be tuning in this morning for the Boxing Day Test. But with Rob, it goes deeper. He has never been able to drive past a cricket ground, no matter how humble or minor. And some years ago, such a stop in the Riverina at a picturesque ground with a picket fence gave him an idea.

So it began: a plan Rob hatched with his old cricket mate Peter Morley and another local resident Peter Woodhouse to enrich their home town with a cricket ground to be proud of. Now it’s borne fruit: the first game on the new Friendlies, two Euroa CC T20s against teams from Shepparton, is scheduled for two weeks hence.

Cricket was Euroa’s first sport. Record of it goes back to the 1860s, within a decade of the town’s founding, when the game was round-arm, rough-hewn and intensely local.

Looking back on pioneer cricket days from 1920, a Euro Advertiser writer called “Old ‘Un” remembered that when the town’s representative team first visited Shepparton, only one member had ever travelled so far before.

Other sports followed. Australian rules football was first played in the area by soldiers sent to defend Euroa from the depredations of the Kelly Gang, who bailed up the National Bank in December 1878. The 1880s brought tennis and cycle clubs. Pat Till won the Stawell Gift in 1922, John Peck the Coleman Medal in 1963-65.

Cricket stayed strongest of all – strong enough to twice host England teams, in February 1951 and December 1965. It also produced two bullocking fast bowlers in Bull Alexander, who became a long-time town councillor, and Merv Hughes, whose father was a local sporting divinity.

The scene, however, began to fade in the 1990s, for reasons not far to seek. John Gilbert, a tireless historian of local cricket, points to social shifts, red tape, lack of assistance from the Victorian Country Cricket League and “bugger all financial help from Cricket Victoria/Cricket Australia”.

Euroa CC, which shares nearby Memorial Oval with Euroa FC, is an amalgamation of clubs formed after the dissolution of the town’s old cricket association in 2000.

Old names ring out to silence like a battalion roll call after a battle: Alexandra, Caniambo, Creighton’s Creek, Diggers, Juniors, Longwood, Miepoll, Ruffy, Tamleugh, United, UFS, Violet Town, Wanderers ...

One vestige of Euroa’s former prestige was Friendlies, the town’s original ground, established on Crown Lands set aside in 1874 and allocated to the local Friendly Society for recreational purposes, although superseded when Memorial Oval gained a turf square in 1934.

Friendlies’ pitches – originally dirt, later mats and malthoid, then finally synthetic – hosted numberless junior teams and lower-grade matches over the decades. Rob first played there in 1954, and remembers the steeling bounce from the pitch’s canted base.

But visitors and tenants showed Friendlies little love, and Euroa, population 3000, has in recent years felt like a poor relation in the Shire of Strathbogie, especially in relation to prospering Nagambie.

When Rob and Peter invited me to check it out in September 2016, Friendlies looked less than amicable.

The hard wicket was worn bare, the grass a scorched patchwork, the dressing shed ramshackle and malodorous – as attested by photographs The Australian took to illustrate a story about much-ballyhooed Cricket Australia plans for a grassroots infrastructure drive.

But the pair had high hopes and time on their hands: Rob is a retired newsagent, Peter a retired accountant.

They persuaded the Rotary Club of Euroa and Burtons Supermarket to co-fund a $20,000 consultant’s masterplan with the Shire; they got on the relevant committee and subcommittee; they undertook to raise a further $50,000 in order to be “shovel ready” for the first stage of the regeneration.

From the authorities the pair received precious little help.

Cricket Victoria offered moral support but no money; Cricket Australia offered no more than a heads-up about Senator Bridget McKenzie’s Community Sports Infrastructure Fund.

McKenzie came to Euroa twice, Peter recalls, and talked a good game: “She said: ‘This is a fantastic project. I’ll go to the council meeting. I’m going to go in there and bat for you. Blah blah blah’.

“So the council applied for a grant for the irrigation, didn’t get a thing, and didn’t hear another word.”

“Damian Drum was the same,” Rob says. “National Party’s so strong here they don’t have to worry.”

So this has not, agrees Strathbogie Mayor Chris Raeburn, been a project of the state, as it were: “It’s a community-driven project that we have supported. Without Rob and Peter, it would have lacked all momentum.”

Junior cricketers put Friendlies to work. Picture: Aaron Francis

Perhaps that enhanced the pair’s passion. Peter was an all-rounder who bowled leg-spin for Essendon and Carlton before a job change removed him to the country. Raising four daughters with wife Di took his time and old footy injuries their toll.

Friendlies was for him both a sporting gift to cricket for “the great times I have had”, and an aesthetic gift to Euroa.

“Friendlies was ugly,” he says. “It was the first thing you saw as you came along the Hume Highway. So developing wasn’t just a way to do something for cricket. It was about beautifying the town.”

It was the picturesque white picket fence that pulled everything together. At the ground Rob had encountered in the Riverina, the fence had been effectively pre-sold to raise money, and bore name plates for its benefactors.

At $100 a panel, Rob and Peter raised $27,500 the same way. The cricket and soccer clubs pitched in. So did a bunch of local businesses and citizens. So, quaintly, did a ghost: it turned out that the last club based at Friendlies, Juniors CC, which folded in 1991, still had $3000 in the bank.

When Strathbogie at last committed funds, so did the state government. In January 2018, Rob and Peter formed part of a photo op on the front of the Euroa Gazette celebrating a grant via Jaclyn Symes MLC: “Jaclyn hits a $100,000 winner.”

Also in the photo was Euroa’s most promising junior cricketer who, reflecting the changing times, is a 16-year-old girl. Georgia Gall, part of a well-known sporting family, plays for the Melbourne Stars in the Women’s Big Bash League.

There have plenty of setbacks along the way. False economies have caused cost overruns. There have been four project managers. The soccer club folded. Hoons did doughnuts on the outfield. COVID stalled distributions and distracted minds.

Peter Woodhouse, a retired solicitor who loved nothing more than propping beneath a tree with a glass of shiraz and watching local cricket, got sick too. Through his drawn-out, debilitating and ultimately unavailing cancer treatment, Rob and Peter kept meeting at Woodhouse’s home so he could continue to feel involved.

The biggest handicap was tough water restrictions, specific to Euroa, imposed by Goulburn Valley Water. For when the council turned to dam water, they succeeded in turning all those pristine white pickets brown.

That left Rob and Peter, with local residents Col Grace and Dozer Kubeil, and fellow Rotarians Michael Bell, Barrie Craven, Bernie O’Day and Bill Sargood, to spend weeks on their hands and knees with brushes and sponges scrubbing the tens of thousands of pickets clean. Both sides, too.

There remains a lot of work to be done. Rob and Peter received the donation of a second-hand roller, but unfortunately it only drives in a straight line.

Part funded by the local Masonic Lodge and with help from volunteers, they’ll be building a shed in January with help from volunteers and funds from the local Masonic Lodge; but they still need $8000-$10,000 for a cylinder mower to keep in it.

Their long-term plan is to rebuild the dark and pokey changing rooms – on a peg in which still hangs a single dirty sun hat, left behind after the last game on Friendlies three years ago.

Rob and Peter have a plan, a vision, and even custodians: Gracey and Dozer visit daily to keep things tidy. It’s only when I ask that Peter realises he doesn’t know Dozer’s actual name. “I did his tax returns for years, too,” he laughs. “Must be a football nickname. He looks like a bit of a dozer.”

But for its first game, scheduled for January 9, the new Friendlies will look a treat. The Santa Anna couch in the outfield is flourishing. The Merri Creek soil of the square is thickly thatched with grass. The fence is neat and gleaming. The game’s first ball will be delivered by Libby Woodhouse, whose late husband did not live to see it. I almost think Rob and Peter should play. Maybe Bev and Di would wash their whites one last time.