By Parker McKenzie
125 years after Monbulk Cricket Club played its inaugural game against Seville on 20 November 1897, the two clubs will meet again to celebrate the monumental anniversary and the launch of the club’s new history book.
125 Not Out: A History of the Monbulk Cricket Club 1897-2022 has been researched and written over the past two years by life member Greg Hardy, chronicling the club’s founding to the modern day.
Monbulk Cricket Club co-president Steve Utting said the idea for the history book started when he was secretary of the club in early 2020.
“Every Saturday I just reviewed all of our club’s premierships. We had 30 or 40 premierships so I just researched all of them, found photos and put them on our Facebook page every Saturday morning which created a lot of interest,” he said.
“Our current co-president Chris Defina and I had the idea of interviewing all of our 48 life members, so that was our next project.”
Once they completed the interviews, the pair decided to compile all the research into a book, when Mr Hardy offered to help with the project.
Mr Hardy said through his two years of research, he has added around 70,000 runs and 5,500 wickets to the club’s database.
“As far as I can work out, Monbulk is the second oldest club in the Dandenongs, with Emerald formed about five or six years earlier,” he said.
“The club kept no records whatsoever prior to 1978 about its past players.”
Mr Hardy said the club was formed by players from the Monbulk Football Club and the team still plays at the same ground albeit under different circumstances.
“There’s a famous story where Seville travelled to Monbulk in 1897 or 1898 in one of the early games and they actually played around piles of logs that had been left on the ground,” he said.
“They write it up as basically to say Monbulk won the game because their players knew where the logs were.”
The club will host Seville during the 125-year celebration at Monbulk Recreational Reserve on Sunday November 20, with a full day featuring a junior cricket T10 game at 10.30am, the book at 12pm, a best 12 and legends team announced at 12.30pm, a finger food lunch, a junior blasters session and the senior T10 match at 2pm before a post-match presentation.
Mr Utting said both the history book and the celebration have grown substantially from the original plans and he expects to see a few hundred people on the day.
“The end product, which is being published now, it’s unbelievable. It’s 350 pages of full pictures, records and amazing stories from each of the 125 years,” he said.
“It’s going to be a big day, we’re just hoping obviously that it doesn’t rain like it has for the last six weeks.”
Mr Hardy said members of the cricket club’s committee have done a remarkable amount of work to get the book together.
“One of the things that struck me is just how important clubs like the cricket, footy and bowls clubs are to these types of smaller communities,” he said.
“It’s a distinct locality in its own right and it’s been that way ever since 1897, which I think is remarkable.”
