Tasmania University Cricket Club

Latest News (23rd. November 2007)

University Contemporary Legends and ABC Friends.

As a curtain-raiser to the fothcoming Twenty20 game a former player has organised a "University Contemporary Legends and ABC Friends" v. "University Students" game. This is planned to start at 2.30 and finish before the real thing.

Match Report


University Legends / ABC Friends:
Back (L to R); Mike Lee (Umpire), Alister Nicholson, Rod Purves, Brad Thomas, Simon McCulloch, Mike Graham-Smith, Dominic McNamara, Martin Betts (Umpire)
Front (L to R); Mark Blair, Peter Gee, Ben Harrison, Craig Harwood, Graeme Blundstone
Seated; Joe Harrison (Mascot)


University Students:
Back (L to R); Mike Lee (Umpire), Ben Hickey, Matt Dunkerley, Josh Parker, Matthew Street, Martin Betts (Umpire)
Front (L/R); Paul McNamara (Captain), Nick Grubb, Mark Fenton, Ross Deans, Alex Quinn
Also Played; Tom Ritchie

Scorer: Sean Wicks

The University Oval was bathed in sunshine and looked a picture. The youthful University Students rolled up with a spring in their steps. The Legends, on the other hand, did not have a spring in their step. However, they did have experience on their side and a recognisable glint in their eyes. Did they have experience in T20 cricket though? Absolutely not!

As the two teams assembled the matter of who would claim the home change rooms was raised. Some lively debate ensued but commonsense prevailed and both teams took up occupancy of the home rooms. Uni caps were presented to our three ABC Friends – Peter Gee, Alister Nicholson and Simon McCulloch. Simon ‘Max’ McCulloch, the ABC television weatherman, already had a Uni cap as he played for the club for many years but he was presented with a ‘modern’ cap anyway. Peter Gee and Alister Nicholson had played for the University football (Aussie Rules) club but this was their first venture out on to the field in whites for Uni.

The two captains talked about the rules for the day. After lengthy discussions it was agreed to bowl from one end to make sure our match was over in time for the main match. The full 20 overs would be used meaning that batsmen who were dismissed or retired could return later. The captain of the Students graciously offered the first bat to the captain of the Legends who gratefully accepted.

Team photographs were taken. Graeme ‘Boots’ Blundstone wore a retro-style motorcycle helmet and one gold batting pad and one white batting pad for the photograph. The umpires and Students and two Legends batsmen took to the field. Unfortunately the curator, Jason Britten, wasn’t ready so there was a delay to the start of the match. To be fair to Jason he had been told the match would start at 2:30 p.m. and that was still quite a few minutes away.

Boots, still wearing his Motorbike helmet, and Dom McNamara opened the innings for the Legends. Now many of these Legends hadn’t played T20 before and, as is the case for many newcomers to this form of the game, all-out attack was often initiated prematurely. Boots fell very early lofting the ball to leg and being caught halfway to the boundary but his humorous cameo appearance was a vintage ‘Boots’ performance. Meanwhile, Dom was striking the ball sweetly and straight.

Mark Blair faced up to Twang Parker off the long run and managed to avoid a short one that fizzed past his helmet-less head. He got behind the next one but one that kept a bit lower got through his defence and bowled him. In general, the Legends batted quite poorly and showed their inexperience in the shortest form of the game. Our score of 17 for 130 from 20 overs was probably a little short of the mark.

Some of the highlights of the Legends batting innings;



Alister Nicholson’s running (or falling between the wickets). Obviously, he wasn’t wearing spikes or he has some balance issues. He did play some enterprising shots none-the-less and his outrageous (and ultimately fruitless) full-length dive to avoid being run out had us all highly amused.

Brad Thomas showed his class and his batting display put the rest of us to shame.



Max McCulloch was very industrious in his innings and played some deft glides to third man. Foolishly, he did a lot of running and was blowing hard when he returned to us.

Craig ‘Razor’ Harwood played a composed innings but his running between the wickets appears to have dropped off quite significantly.



Peter Gee was the surprise packet and played shots to all parts of the ground.

Mike ‘Cowboy X’ Graham-Smith fell to the ‘premature attack’ mode of thinking but his second dig was a bit better! He promised to retire if he failed to hit a 6 from any three balls that he faced in his second incarnation. It was probably the tonic he needed and went about hitting 5 sixes in no time at all.

Rod ‘Rocket’ Purves and Ben ‘Bolts’ Harrison chipped in with the bat but much was expected of them with the ball. Bolts was run out and appeared to be very unhappy with himself or the umpire’s decision.

Perhaps the highlight of the innings happened when Mark Blair was dismissed and Alister Nicholson went in to bat. Now we have all seen the ultimate act of ‘country cricket’ when the incoming batsman walks out without a bat and takes the bat from the outgoing batsman halfway out to the wicket. We all thought this was the ultimate act of ‘country cricket’ (along with the black electrical tape wrapped around the bottom of the bat so many times that it sits half an inch off the surface of the bat or trousers tucked into black socks or smoking in the slips or caps worn backwards – the list goes on!) but now any of those incidents have slipped to penultimate or anti-penultimate acts of ‘country cricket’. The two batsmen met and didn’t exchange bats but Blairy did take out his box and Alister (aka frog-bandit) inserted the said equipment! This match report wouldn’t have been complete without a full-blown account of this sweaty/pubic hairs/STI frog incident!

One Tom Ritchie took a fine outfield catch.

The change in innings was brief and the Legends captain was pleased to learn that we would have a new ball at our disposal as well.

The Students were never really going to struggle to chase down the paltry target and they did so with quite a few wickets and two overs to spare.

The time in the field for the Legends was a priceless experience and everyone thoroughly enjoyed themselves.

Some highlights included;

Paul McNamara (Uni President) exacted his revenge on Mike Graham-Smith (previous Uni President) by hitting him for a six and a couple of boundaries as Mike had done to him.

Some of the chases in the field left a lot to be desired. Often two or three Legends would be holding up the arm and pointing and eventually one of them had to bite the bullet and run to field the ball.

Blairy generated good pace off an oldish deck and hit Matt Dunkerley in the helmet.

Peter Gee bowled a couple of very impressive overs. His action was well-suited to swing bowling and he bowled a couple of jaffas. He recently made an appearance for the Last Over XI team and judging by his performances in this match it won’t be his last outing for the Uni Legends.

The puns started to flow when ABC weatherman, Max McCulloch came on to bowl;

“We’ll celebrate the win at Isobar tonight”

“Come on Max. Let’s get Cirrus about getting this bloke out”.

“You’re looking very Nimbus on your feet Max”

“Let’s stick to the team Strato-gies”

And the prize for the worst pun of all goes to Cowboy X – “We must stop the runs from A-Cumulus-ing”!

Perhaps the best moment of the match was when ABC television weatherman, Simon McCulloch dropped a catch at point from the bowling of ABC television news presenter, Peter Gee.

“The ABC television news studio will have an icy atmosphere tonight”, yelled Boots. “It will certainly be a frosty throw to the weather tonight”’ replied Peter Gee. For what was actually said at 7.25 pm on the ABC news - we'll leave that to Simon.

Brad, Blairy and Boots all presented themselves in tip-top condition for the game. They are all, well and truly, on the wrong (or right, depending on which way you look at it) side of 35 and will qualify for Over 40s cricket quite soon but they have lost nothing and all ran around in much the same way as they did as 20 year old men! Boots threw himself around in the field. Many of us wouldn’t even contemplate a dive these days! Blairy’s arm is still the rocket it always was.

Peter Gee and Dom McNamara squabbled over a catch hit high into the air and another Jason Gillespie-Steve Waugh incident was on the cards. Sanity prevailed and the catch was taken.

Bolts and Dom bowled well but the pick of the bowlers was probably Rocket. The recently-retired Uni stalwart showed that he can still match it in competitive cricket. Mind you, he did break team rules and turned out for training before the match! Rocket clean ripped a couple of students and claimed another wicket when stand-in keeper, Mike Graham-Smith, took a brilliant catch. The first-pick wicketkeeper Razor let out a celebratory beagle!

Both teams joined together in the change rooms to sing the club song with gusto. However, it did feel quite strange singing “Roll over Uni, your navel’s on the other side!”

All in all it was a brilliant day. Old acquaintances were reunited and fond memories were rekindled.

No doubt there will be many stiff and sore bodies after the match and it may take some Legends players some time to recover. It is one thing being relatively fit and another thing altogether being match fit for cricket.

Let’s hope we can all recover for the proposed Town vs. Gown match which will be the warm-up match for the TCA Twenty20 match between the Lions and the Sharks in mid January.

And a final word from Simon McCulloch.

"Thanks for a great afternoon. P Gee went on afternoon radio bagging me for dropping a catch off his bowling. I got a right of reply at 545pm when we spent about 10mins on local radio discussing the match (mainly Pete bagging me). We made sure we plugged the main game so you could get some publicity!

"To finish a bad day (personally) Pete threw to the weather with " and now to the man with safest pair of hands in the country..."

"I think I fumbled my response to that as well!

"Thanks to everyone for a fun afternoon."


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