by Steven Lynch
Friday, December 27, 2002 The Melbourne Cricket Ground has got the builders in these days, with a great bite out of the side of the ground near the railway. A few miles outside the city, another ground with a bit of cricket history behind it is receiving similar treatment - but this time it's terminal.

Just on 25 years ago, VFL Park staged the first of Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket SuperTests. Established venues barred the so-called circus, so they played at a variety of strange places. With the MCG a no-go area, Packer moved out to the Victoria Football League Park, which was a purpose-built Aussie Rules football stadium.

In that first SuperTest, in December 1977, Ian Chappell's Australians took on Clive Lloyd's West Indians on a pitch which was grown in a greenhouse on the corner of the grounds, and dropped in later. Not surprisingly, Andy Roberts and Michael Holding took a liking to this surface, and took seven wickets apiece as the West Indians won.

The identity of Australia's top-scorer in that match would win you a few quizzes: it was Ray Bright, the left-arm spinner, with 69. Rick McCosker was out before a run was scored, but the West Indians had a trump card. Viv Richards made 79 in the first innings and 56 in the second as his side squeaked home by three wickets.

It wasn't quite the first World Series match - that was at an even more modest Melbourne ground, at Moorabbin - but it was the first big game.

And less than a fortnight later there was another innovation - on Dec 14 they played a match under the football floodlights. Attendances had been paltry until then, but the novel idea of cricket under lights packed them in. Packer and his cohorts spotted the potential, and from then on the lights were on more often than not. Floodlit cricket was born.

VFL Park was never popular, even with Aussie Rules fans. It was exposed, cold and windy in winter, and starkly functional. It wouldn't have won many prizes for design, except perhaps in a Meccano competition. It was built at the end of the 1960s, along with a promise that a rail link would be built to ferry the fans the 20 or so miles out along the South-Eastern Freeway towards Dandenong.

But the rail link was delayed ... and delayed. VFL Park continued to stage Aussie Rules matches until a couple of years ago, but it never caught the public imagination, and the original cunning plan of wresting the season's big match, the Grand Final, away from the MCG never passed the pipedream stage.

For years the most assiduous users of the Park and its surrounding car-parks have been the local cyclists and triathletes, who enjoyed the safety of car-free roadways. But all that ended when the developers moved in and fenced the area off. Now most of the stands have gone, and the four floodlight towers are on borrowed time.

The ground is being levelled, and will be replaced by around 1500 homes. The new residents still won't have a railway within coo-ee. And, according to one of the displaced cyclists, they won't have very big gardens, either.

But the house nearest the centre of that drop-in pitch ought to have a big blue plaque saying "Floodlit one-day cricket started here - and the game was never quite the same."

Steven Lynch is editor of Wisden.com.

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