If you take cricket seriously, don't read this. It will upset you too much.
It's about Barnawartha North, who play C Grade in Mercantile. They break every rule that other clubs live by.
Two seasons ago "Barnie" played our thirds in the grand final. Naturally all their regulars wanted to play. So they went down the pub and drew the side out of a hat. This, we learned, was a club rule.
Fourteen players pay $200 a season and form "the 200 club". They get first priority for any game, and if too many are available, a lottery takes place.
For the grand final, the three who missed the semi-final automatically got a game. The other eight came out of the hat. Form didn't matter, so their best batsman and a leading all-rounder missed out.
Captain for the week was founding member Tommy Vana. The captain changes every game, and he has to ensure the side has eleven players, and more importantly, meat and beer for the BBQ. In return, he can bat and bowl when he likes.
Tommy organised a marathon barbie for the grand final. It started before the game, and went all weekend. Players regularly left the field to grab a snag and give the reserves a run. Unlike the Reds, who warmed up intensely, the Barnawartha North batsmen just munched steak sandwiches.
The club hasn't trained or warmed up for nine years.
It held a pre-season practice in its first three years, but everyone decided that was too serious. As usual the Barnawartha batting was agricultural. Their scoring rattled along at slightly under run-a-minute, but their biggest hitter, Shane "Slim" Gurnett, was caught on the boundary for a quickfire 36. Earlier that season, Slim had come in at 5/31 chasing 140, and smashed 191 in 80 minutes off 88 balls. His innings included 23 sixes and 10 fours, and an adjacent District thirds game stopped while he rained sixes onto their ground.
When they fielded we saw another club tradition -- the nine-man slips cordon. This was seen as remarkable when Australia used it briefly in Zimbabwe, but Barnawartha North starts every innings with it.
It began as a joke in its first game to bluff the batsman about the bowler's pace. The nine slips remain until a couple of runs are scored. (That once took the opposition six overs.) If the ball gets driven, the bowler chases it himself. It serves him right for not bowling to his field.
The widest catch ever taken in the cordon was by Marty Vana at fifth slip. Marty took it one-handed because he had a chicken schnitzel sandwich in his other hand. (He couldn't appeal because his mouth was full.)
As they fielded, they regularly passed around the Silly Hat. The last player to misfield or make a duck must wear it. A huge jester's hat in the awful club colours of green and brown, it was previously pink with a donkey's tail and before that, a cap with a whirligig. The green and brown, incidentally, represent the bush.
Tom and Marty Vana founded the club twelve years ago with two mates in a pub to perpetuate the spirit of bush cricket. For a name, someone recalled a sign on the Hume Highway near Wodonga pointing to Barnawartha North, a place with no buildings or people, just trees. A club from a mythical country town was just what they wanted.
At stumps on the Saturday, Reds were 1/56 chasing Barnawartha's 198. But that couldn't stop the Barnie boys partying. The BBQ went all night, and players slept under the stars. Three players headed for a city night club and got back at 4am.
The hangovers made the Sunday difficult. The temperature reached 40 degrees, and a Reds opener played maybe the slowest innings in history -- 27 in six hours.
Tommy Vana brought himself on to bowl. Tommy once took five wickets against Reds, but this was still daring. You see, Tommy bowls pure trash, in the tradition of 1950s Leicestershire captain C.E.Palmer who took 8/7 in a county game bowling donkey-drops.
Tommy bowls with the action of an uncoordinated five-year-old, and every over contains a donkey-drop and balls that bounce four times. Several batsmen succumb each season trying to hit Tommy out of the park. But Tommy could not win it for Barnawartha North.
The Reds forces of austere socialism ground past them with two wickets in hand.
Undaunted, Barnawartha made the four again last year, only to lose in raucous good humour in the semi-final.
This year, the club is taking the theatre of the absurd to new heights. It composed a ribald anthem to its favourite eccentric umpire and sang it to him during a game. It is buying garden gnomes to replace its boundary flags, and trying to fit wheels to a clubroom sofa so that players can push it around Fawkner Park and watch their games from it.
The club is also touring New Zealand, but somehow I doubt the Kiwis are ready for them.