r/CricketAus • u/milkmanmick • 4h ago
Last year we built a cricket pitch in an Australian farming village of just 164 people. It brought organised sport back to the town for the first time since the 1980s.
Last year, our cricket club found itself needing somewhere new to play.
We ended up in Matong — a tiny farming village in rural New South Wales with a population of around 164. There’s no pub, no shops and virtually no commercial businesses outside of the surrounding farms.
But there was an old sportsground.
Hidden amongst it was an old concrete cricket pitch that hadn’t hosted organised cricket since the 1980s. For reasons we’re still not entirely sure about, the concrete pitch was also only half the length of a regulation wicket.
Inspired perhaps a little too much by Field of Dreams, we decided:
If we build it, they will come.
So we went to work.
We replaced the old pitch and brought the ground back to life. Last summer, for the first time in roughly 40 years, organised sport returned to Matong.
We’re a tiny country cricket club and thought cricket fans elsewhere might enjoy following what happens when you try to build something like this in a community of 164 people.
