The first year of the Reds as told by 'Uncle' Alec Kahn
The Reds were conceived in a series of annual social matches played between the Communist Party and the International Socialists back in the late '70s, when the ISs suffered less from sectarianism and the CPA less from rigor mortis.
The games were played on a concrete pitch with 40-yard boundaries in Caulfield Park, and the inflated scoring gave several of us an equally inflated idea of our own capabilities. (it also gave early notice of Dave Dunstan's alarming proclivity for consuming wine and chicken lunches and then plundering cheap 50s off social match bowling.)
So on that fateful night of 5 August 1979, Tony Roberts, Ken Norling, Dave Dunstan, myself and the ephemeral Kim Bannikoff gathered in Tony's dingy parlour at the rear of 176 Rathdowne St and decided to form a club. I was unhappy at my old club; Tony had had a successful season with some workmates playing for Southern Socials (later redubbed Southern Nazis) but found the prospect of swapping left-wing gossip each Saturday irresistible; Ken was a superannuated suburban cricketer with a midlife urge to recapture his youth; and Dave hadn't played competitively since public school days and wanted a chance to put all that expensive coaching into practice. God knows why Banners turned up. Absent was the other chief instigator, Dave Nadel, the consummate spectator sportsman who wanted to form a club so incompetent that, unlike his famous facesake, he would be glad to be a member. As usual, Dave had a good excuse for being absent, but he had the decency to send along a name : ROYAL PARK REDS. We said we'd think about it.
I guess between the six of us, we covered just about every reason that anyone has ever joined up for since. We all promised $50 towards the project (some even paid) and thereby gave rise to two enduring themes: perpetual under-capitalization, and the three-year disappearance of Mr Bannikoff.
We spent the next two months extracting donations of equipment, buying el cheapo Buffalo pad, that fell apart in a season, entering a side in the Northern Suburban Cricket Association lit had many teams in Royal Park, which seemed a fitting home for a bunch of rootless cosmopolitans, as Rabbi Karl would have described us), recruiting players, and holding a fund-raising party at Trevor Fleming's fashionable share-terrace in Carlton that raised more libido than cash ($16 to be exact).
In that first season, the Reds were a genuinely red ensemble. We had six members or fellow travellers of the CPA (Comrades Norlinq, Hewett, Gatiss, McNiece, Fleming and Campbell), five from the IS (Nadel, T.Roberts, Kahn, Wallman and Cousland), a Yuppie-turned-Yuppie (Comrade Dunstan), and a librarian from the Weather Bureau, Richard Overell, representing the' urban proletariat. We also had an apprentice Spartacist, Steve King, who had terrible trouble keeping his box in place because he never more underpants. Understandably, his innings never lasted long and neither did his career. His graduation to full Sparticism demanded Saturday afternoon devotions of a more religious kind in the struggle for full programmatic clarity. He gave up cricket when he learned that the Cannon Driver was not named after the father of American Trotskyism.
Of course, we were not above the struggle for programmatic clarity ourselves. At least one opposition scorer was bemused to find himself in the middle of a raging debate about the invasion of Afghanistan, a much more interesting subject than the potterings of our top-order batsmen.
We practised on Wednesday in the nets adjacent to the Swan St Barracks, in deference to those who did not live in the Carlton-Brunswick ghetto. Fortunately, only Hewett's bowling was erratic enough to force us to invade the seat of state power to retrieve lost balls. How typical that the CPA's most cautious bureaucrat should turn out to be a provocateur. It was a lovely lush spot in which to practise, provided that the sun wasn't out and blinding the bowlers, and that we'd got there early enough to claim the pitch without the lethal crack. If we were on the wicket of death, however, even Dave Dunstan turned into a Harold Larwood.
One day, after being hit in the face three times by Dave's leaping lollipops, I rang the City Council to complain. Alf Rome listened to my tale, and then cheerily replied, 'Well, that's what matting cricket's all about, isn't it?' It was the start of a long and fruitless relationship. (Dave later devoted a very flattering chapter to the development of City Council practice pitches in his official history of - the Melbourne municipality ... written, I might add, in Alf Rowe's office.)
Our home ground was a sun-scorched piece of earth on the brow of the hill in the middle of Royal Park, called (imaginatively) Royal Park No. 0. This was to distinguish it from Royal Park Nos 6, 9 and It, which all overlapped (leading to occasional confusion about boundaries, kicking over of each others' flags, and stentorian roars from Dave Dunstan to 'Leave that ball ALONE'), and Royal Park Nos 2, 4, 7 and 14, where we played our 'away' games. Not for us the lure of romantic faraway places such as Donath Reserve and Debney's Park. Royal Park No. B is now home to an even greater exercise in futility, the MCC's 'great Australian backyard'. Maybe at least now it will get some water.
The ground had just one tree, one sightscreen (the Children's Hospital), and one advantage: we could set a huge square leg boundary on one side and safely bowl our spinners. This was just as well, since our attack featured Tony Roberts (slow-, sorry, fast-medium), Ken Norling and myself (erratic wrist-spin), and a cast of thousands in the other opening bowling spot. The novelty of a spin attack proved too much for most of our opponents, and once Trevor Fleming had prised the gloves off me, he had great fun, claiming seven stumpings in his first two innings.
Selection, that bane of future years, was never a problem with just one side. With 13 regulars, we always seemed to have 11 available each Saturday or someone's mate to stand in. Two games stand out in my memory from that first season, against the other two top sides in C grade. One was against Fulham Wanderers on a dangerous asphalt pitch. Ken Norlinq held the side together before being bowled by the very quick Wayne Baker with one that shot up from a good length to smash into his jaw and then down onto the stumps. In a finish, Fulham collapsed against our spinners to lose by a run. I'll never forget Fulham's umpire as he gave their last man out LBW, pointinq one finqer skywards while he covered his eyes with the other digits. What character! (Would you have done the same in the last game of last season, John Prent, if Charlie hadn't been run out during the appeal? Only you and your conscience will ever know, I guess.)
The other memorable game was against RAOD, the Royal and Ancient Order of Buffaloes. I had cunningly (I thought) persuaded Tony to take the Victorious C-grade Grand Final team 1980/1 I job of umpires' appointment secretary in NSCA, in the hope that with a bit judicious favouritism we could avoid the drunks and eccentrics who emerge from their park benches to umpire suburban cricket. (Not for nothing did Dave Bowen dub me 'Homo manipulatus'.) Alas, in our desire to capture the key stronghold in the bureaucracy we had not reckoned upon Tony's political conscience. The girlfriend of one of the younger umpires decided to try her beau's hobby, and Tony felt that the Reds would be the side politically best equipped to cope with such a radical innovation as a woman umpire. It was a principled but fatal decision. Janet had obviously never played a game of cricket in her life, and probably not even watched one. She proceeded to give five of our batsmen out to outrageous LBWS in the first innings, and several more in the second. She later confided to me that 'I gave them out because when the fieldsmen appealed, I had to assume they were honest appeals.'
Foolishly, in the midst of this farce we recalled Pollard, RAOB's best batsman, when Janet gave him LBW to one off the middle of the bat., and he plundered a brilliant century. He also put Dave Nadel in hospital with a sickening drive into Dave's glasses, (At first we thought Dave had taken a miracle catch, then we realized it was his head he was _ holding.)
Where to field Dave was the trickiest problem I faced as Reds captain, and I first hit on mid-on as a position where he could bluff the batsmen into not running while mid-off ran around to collect the inevitable misfield. In time I refined this to short mid-on, as most C-grade batsmen had more rat cunning than power and soon realized they could safely dab singles in front of the dawdling Nadel. Alas, against RAOB's pocket Botham I forgot to move Dave out aqain.
However, it wasn't that mistake that Dave held against me. He returned from his hospital bed on the second day, ready to play an Eddy Paynter/Rick McCosker-like innings as we fought to stave. off the outright. But. in our desperate attempts to keep Dave off strike for the final river, I (acting as runner) backed up too far and was Mankaded, denying Dave his place in folklore and producing the first Reds temper tantrum as he kicked down the stumps in outrage (the theatre of the moment was somewhat diminished when Dave needed two kicks to knock them over).
Dave can, however, claim one unbeatable record: the first 'six' to be recorded by a Reds batsman. In the second innings of a dead match, an opposition bowler, frustrated by Dave's ability to miss everything except. the balls on the stumps, sent down an underarm lob. Summoning up his full repertoire of attacking strokes, Dave swiped it through cover. tie took a single, and his partner, sensing a chance to double Dave's aggregate, called him far a second. Dave's running was no better than the rest of his game, but the attempted runout produced four overthrows. Alas, gave could never produce such brilliance again. His next and last season produced just one run, and that was taken on an edge into slips which two fieldsmen managed to make attempts at but dropped.
Inane banter, however, was probably the singular lasting tradition established in that first careless year. Andrew Hewett coined the first and best warcry, 'Hammer and sickle 'em, Reds'. Trevor Flemming had the less political 'Pierce his ears' and the inane 'No Concepto".. Yours truly could only manage the slightly forced 'Swinging like the middle class vote'. We had to wait for the advent of Draqan T. for the derivative 'Come on, you Re-eds', Russell Wright for the academic touch of 'In the realm of metaphysics', Gareth Owen for the tediously obscure 'Remember the Belgrano', and Kent Middleton for the one-man crowd.
As in the following two season, we came to the last round needing to win to make the four, and, as in the following two seasons, grabbed second spot with an overwhelming outright victory. Some sleazy detective work by the fifth side unearthed the fact that RAOB's ace batsman, Pollard, had crossed from Collingwood thirds without a clearance, and RAOB lost all its points, putting us on top. Alas, we fell in a heap in our first semi-final against a surly crowd named Coburg Socials. (funny how the teams named Socials were always the most anti-. Though I met a couple of them during a mass meeting of pasties a year or two later, and they turned out to have better union politics than quite a few of our players.) We had thrashed them during the year, but despite the heroic efforts of Mr Finals, Tony Roberts (0/40), to bowl them nut and Alan Gatiss to punch them out, they ground their way past our meagre 95. But in doing so, they contributed a priceless phrase to our stock of enduring cliches.
After every single painstaking run, their skipper Bill Morgan bellowed 'Head down, start again'. Somehow, it seems an appropriately trite note on which to enter our second decade.