A pitch destroyed, a club renewed

At this time of year in Australia, the sights and sounds of club cricket grounds take on a slightly different feel. Drive or walk past and you will sense an extra frisson: the appeals, exhortations and celebrations are edgier, with a greater sense of finality. It is season's end, and premierships beckon for those still competing into autumn.

Had you been wandering past Skinner Reserve in Braybrook to Melbourne's inner west on the morning of February 27, the sensation would have been rather different. Instead of seeing Kingsville Baptist Cricket Club pressing hard against the out-of-contention Sunshine Heights for the win that would secure them a finals berth, you would have glimpsed scenes of dismay and anger at a turn of events well outside the bounds of the normal.

Kingsville were to resume at 1 for 46 chasing 186, a position of some strength. That morning the club coach, Simo Levic, arrived early to prepare for the day, and was flabbergasted by what confronted him. Covers laid over the pitch on the Friday were in place, but it was clear that had not been the case all night. When Levic peeled them back, he found the surface had been dug up on a good length and around the crease at either end, with oil poured into the new crevices. An act of pointed vandalism.

As the players turned up in the ensuing hours, a sense of infuriation welled inside many. Their season had effectively been ended, for no regulations existed in the Victorian Turf Cricket Association to deal with such an eventuality. The past two years had been fruitful for Kingsville: in 2015 they collected the trophy as winners of the West B1 division in the VTCA and were set to make the A1 finals in the first year since promotion.

Pictures of the ruined pitch quickly made waves on Facebook, and a fair degree of publicity was generated over the next few days out of hope that more information would be uncovered. The association's president, Steve McNamara, reserved the right to act unilaterally against any club found to have been connected with the destruction, and offered a A$5,000 reward for any information leading to answers.

Early the following week, Kingsville CC's players were told to train as though there may still be a finals appearance ahead of them, while McNamara and others waited for a call from Victoria Police to indicate a culprit. That outcome, confidently hoped for on Monday February 29, had not arrived by Thursday, and the club were reluctantly eliminated.

As Footscray United went on to beat Altona Roosters in the grand final, Kingsville held a clean-up day to mark the end of the season, while sending a letter to the association with some ideas for how to remove any incentives for vandals within the competition. "There's no plan in place to prevent this from happening," the Kingsville CC president John Hillis says. "At the moment, if it happens you're just shut out - it happened, bad luck, end of your season. The theme of our letter is to have rules in place so clubs can follow them if it happens."

There have been some leads since, in response to the reward offer. One informer came forward with the suggestion that members of his club may have been involved, and offered circumstantial supporting evidence. Discussions have been had about how to pursue this further, but private investigations become legally murky, and the Victoria Police have plenty of other pressing matters at hand. McNamara, though, has stated that action will be taken, even if it takes years for the culprits to be found.

"Irrespective of when, five or ten years down the track, if there's corroborating evidence, we'd expect we'd still pursue prosecution for those responsible," McNamara says. "There needs to be a resolution and also needs to be someone held responsible to make sure people don't get similar ideas in the future.

"We do a rule review every year and we're looking at some rules to ensure this doesn't happen again. One thing we will certainly look at is the provision to change a venue in mid-match if need be, which takes away some of the motivation to do it."

Something that stood out instantly about the Kingsville case was the method used to wreck the pitch. For 40 years vandals connected with cricket have had a most high-profile example to follow, and invariably have. An Ashes-deciding Test match at Headingley was aborted in August 1975 when activists protested the sentencing of a London cab driver called George Davis to 20 years in prison for armed robbery. His name and the saboteurs' method is so synonymous with pitch vandalism that one observer reflexively tweeted "George Davis is innocent!" upon hearing of Kingsville CC's plight. Not only did the vandals know what they were doing - they knew cricket.

Other episodes of destruction have surfaced intermittently since, and in Australia seem recently to have centred upon Melbourne suburban competition. In October 2014 a sub-district match between Ivanhoe and Williamstown was abandoned after vandals used part of a picket fence to gouge holes in the wicket at Ivanhoe Park before spraying a solvent-based paint on the playing surface. Given the early-season status of the match and lack of any obvious motive, police, clubs and competition concluded it to be mindless rather than Machiavellian work.

More disturbing events had taken place at the end of the previous season, in a sequence of events that might have even made Kingsville CC's players gasp. In the Williamstown and District Association Grand Final for 2014, West Newport played off against Grand United. Having made 262, Grand United slipped to 9 for 171 in reply, and entered the final day with only the faintest hope of victory. West Newport's players arrived that morning to find the pitch had been dug up at one end, destined to be deemed unplayable. Lacking any regulations to deal with the situation, the WDCA declared a drawn game.

Disgusted by events and disillusioned by the lack of any recourse, West Newport resolved to change competitions. "It's what's driving the players this year," the club coach Ross Cassidy told the Hobsons Bay Leader in early 2015. "We did feel like it's the start of something fresh. It's nice to play some different sides, and play on some different grounds." West Newport moved into the West B1 division of the VTCA, where they were beaten in a semi-final by none other than Kingsville CC.

The Kingsville story has been that of many Australian clubs, with playing numbers dropping in the mid-2000s as the game experienced a lull at all levels, stagnating pretty much everywhere from the Test team and the Cricket Australia boardroom to the most modest levels of club and junior cricket. Kingsville CC's junior teams were forced to disband in 2005. The entirety of the club could quite easily have gone the same way without the work of numerous diligent club men, including the president, Hillis, treasurer Peter Hardeman, and life members such as George Kotsiris.

As cricket has begun to regenerate through a far more diverse playing community, Kingsville chose to follow the lead of several other clubs by engaging a pair of import players from Sri Lanka, Sujith Nikethana and Dishan Aravinda Kankanamage. They mixed well with a group that also featured Indian and Bangladeshi players in addition to those of more European heritage, whether distant or recent. Near enough to instant results were secured in 2014-15, before this season's harder fight in a higher division was made less intimidating by an influx of players swayed by the B1 flag.

"We have a lot of Sri Lankan refugees at our club, and young Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis," Hillis says. "The club lost some players through the 2000s and lost our juniors, but the last three or four years we've really targeted the people in the community who really love the game, a lot from the subcontinent, and 70% of our club would be from that part of the world now.

"Even when you're playing against the other clubs, you see a lot of subcontinental guys turning out for them who now live here. We made the decision to embrace different cultures, we're now very multicultural and it's very good to see. It's the best thing about cricket to me, the different cultures coming together to play a sport. We have dinner nights where we all try Indian or Sri Lankan food and that just brings everyone together."

So it is that Kingsville CC's tale is worth telling as an example of how the Australian game is changing. From shrinking stocks of players in the narrow European backgrounds of the old Australia, many clubs have bottomed out and rebuilt in an image far more reflective of the nation in the 21st century. From a position where, Hillis says, the club might eventually have died, it is now growing again. Its rise to contending for the A1 West division title had clearly been too rapid for some.

That brings us back to Skinner Reserve, the broken turf and suspicions about an attack on a club that may be perceived to have risen too far, too fast. Hillis wonders at the motivations of those who would sabotage the end of a season in a park-cricket competition, where players are essentially taking part for the enjoyment of it, without any sort of major financial reward in store. "It's pretty sad for a local game that someone's got to go to this extreme to stop a team with a chance."

But as Australian cricket is finally becoming more diverse, so too the world is growing into a harsher and more unfeeling place. McNamara pointed to the fact that the Greenvale Kangaroos Premier ground, to Melbourne's north, was also damaged during the finals. Cars broke into the ground, did burnouts on the wicket and dragged the sightscreen into the middle of the oval. "I think it's a circumstance of society at the moment," McNamara says. "It seems to be that fair play isn't necessarily fair play anymore."

The vandals of 1975 were making a clumsy point about a man they believed to be innocent. Those of 2016 were one of two things: self-interested or sadistic. Kingsville can at least take consolation from the fact that their case has demonstrated a better side of human nature, particularly in how the club has responded to their unjust fate.

Hillis made sure at the club clean-up BBQ that players were counselled not to be making accusations against other clubs or officials on social media. "I've been proud of the fact no one has gone to that extreme," he says. "Obviously they're frustrated and angry, but they haven't gone down that path." Changes to the VTCA rules would be a longer-lasting benefit than Kingsville's current pain.

"They could easily have dropped their bundle," McNamara says, "but they've earned a lot of respect throughout the competition for the way they've handled it."

There is talk of re-forming at least one junior team next season, as many of those who have helped regenerate Kingsville Baptist CC are now parents of school-age children. In that way at least, those welcome sounds of club cricket, celebration and exultation may yet grow out of February's callously ploughed turf.