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C’mon Aussie C’mon

They (mostly) come from a land Down Under.

Tom McCluskey

Sep 07, 2026

Sometimes, when you are living overseas, you forget the specific things you miss. Then, without warning, something pops out at you, and you are dragged straight back to a time, a place, or a feeling from home that all you can do is stand there and drink it in.

These moments are fleeting, rare, and unscripted. I can count only a few in the years I have been in Ireland: hearing Paul Kelly pluck the opening note of From St Kilda to Kings Cross at The Academy in 2025, sitting in a Dingle pub this summer beneath a framed, signed Geelong jumper donated by local GAA hero and AFL star Mark O’Connor.

I had another one of those moments on Friday night. I was standing at backward point in Phoenix Park, about to start our match against the newest side in the country: the Australian Cricket Club. As our opener, Joff, stood at his marker, a long, drawn-out Australian voice drifted across the turf like a wave of pure nostalgia: “Bowler’s Name?”

It is a sound as iconic as Benaud, Cometti, or Kylie. It’s “That’s a knife” or “Where the bloody hell are you?” for cricket fans. It carried a heavy hit of home for every Australian on the field, and for the club’s organiser, Rhys Rutherford, that feeling is precisely why this team exists.

Rhys hails from Wollongong, though he moved to Ireland two decades ago as a 21-year-old, where he now lives with his family in Galway. He is the kind of self-described cricket nerd who was reading Mark Taylor’s autobiography at age eleven, though I can’t imagine what else a pre-teen male would want to read! After years of playing league cricket with Athlone, he set out this year to build a social haven for Australian expats. It is a side where the emphasis sits firmly on fun rather than skill, built on the promise of a game, a family-friendly atmosphere, and a few cold beers afterwards.

On Friday, they were up against the Phoenix Taverners, a group for whom a Friday evening T20 is the ultimate reward for surviving another working week. The Taverners lads have been at this for years and are as welcoming a group as you will find anywhere in Irish cricket. Aussie CC embraced the adjustments of Taverners cricket with total respect: you cannot go out first ball, batters retire upon reaching twenty, LBWs are banished from the laws of the game, and bowlers are capped at two overs max to guarantee every single player has a contribution to the game.

What traspired was a remarkable example of what social sport should be. There was a husband-and-wife combination sharing the field. Expats not just from Australia played for the Australian XI, showing it to be a welcome home to all who love the game of cricket.

Then there was an Aussie expat and his young son, an Irish native. In the first innings, the boy was run out while answering his father’s desperate call for a second run, a piece of advice we gently assured the young man he could be bring up at regular intervals for the next twenty years. Later on, he bowled to our top order, sending down an incredibly hard-to-pick googly that had us second-guessing ourselves.

Special mention has to go to Laura. Completely new to the sport, she copped a couple of sharp blows to the glove from a bowler hailing from the Canary Islands who isn’t much more experienced himself. To her absolute credit, she dusted herself off, got off the mark, and then bowled a couple of very handy overs to earn herself Australia CC’s first ever Taverners Player of the Match, along with a well-deserved bottle of red to take back home to Galway.

Above all, the match was played in a terrific spirit. Reputation is everything in Taverners cricket. There are no league tables, no premierships or trophies, no batting average awards. Ensuring you get invited back for a fixture next season relies entirely on your team’s character and your commitment to playing the game with a socially-minded attitude. On that front, Aussie CC could not have put on a more ringing endorsement of themselves. They are fantastic people brought together by the pull of the game, and they promise to be a wonderful addition to the Irish cricket landscape for years to come.

However, behind the warmth of last Friday evening was an unfortunate reality. Setting up a social team from scratch in Leinster means facing a system bursting at the seams.

Without a deck of their own, Rhys’s side is forced to live as nomads, relying entirely on the hospitality of established clubs to host them. It is a problem he understood as a fixtures secretary at Athlone, and a challenge he identified the moment he tried to get a social team off the ground.

The frustration led Rhys to draft a detailed proposal for Cricket Ireland and Cricket Leinster, outlining the severe fixture congestion choking the province. His document highlighted how even the largest clubs struggle to balance multiple men’s league teams, thriving women’s sections, and junior pipelines. In that scramble for pitch time Taverners and recreational cricket are pushed aside or forced into weeknight fixtures that working adults and parents simply cannot commit to.

His solution is quite practical: a collaborative effort between governing bodies and local councils to install a single artificial wicket on a public park in Leinster. A shared municipal ground, managed via an advance booking system, could comfortably host over 60 organised fixtures a season, offering a home for groundless social teams, women’s developmental sides, and the ever growing junior setup.

After sending his proposal to dozens of administrators and receiving absolute silence, Rhys finally has a meeting locked in with Cricket Ireland. Supported by established Taverners sides and independent teams alike, he is fighting for the idea that cricket should be accessible to people who love the game but cannot commit to the rigours of weekend league structures.

There was an irony to Friday night. Here was a floating, homeless team of expats playing on the surface of the oldest club in Ireland, surrounded by nearly two centuries of history, while campaigning for just one strip of public turf to call their own.

Cricket has always been about more than who comes out on top. It is about the community that gathers around this wonderful sport and the friendships and memories that are forged. On Friday, as the shadows lengthened across Phoenix Park, Laura bagged her bottle of red, and a young fella argued with his dad about a tight two, it was obvious that Rhys has built something worth protecting. Hopefully the heavy work he is doing to find them a place to play is honoured by Cricket Ireland, because we cannot wait to hear “Bowler’s Name?” called out in a thick Aussie drawl for many years to come.

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By Tom McCluskey · Launched 6 months ago

Dublin-based Aussies and best mates . Bridging the gap between the MCG and Malahide for our own sanity, one essay at a time.

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