This Beaufort stalwart has seen the game from flannels to T20

Beginning his cricketing journey at 17 playing with the Geelong Churches Cricket Association - called the 'Geelong Protestant Churches Cricket Association', until a St Joseph's College Christian brother was discovered playing for the Protestants under an assumed name - Mr Humphries recalls the standard of cricket as being high.

"The Churches comp was very strong, some good cricketers played in it, mostly in their junior days," he says.

"I can remember Alan Connolly, the fast bowler for Australia. In fact, I've got a bit of a scar under an eye after I decided I might try and hit him out of the out of the practice nets one night. It was a hard wicket competition and there were a number of test players and state players came out of it."

That situation has changed, and country cricket now finds itself struggling to attract players to all forms of the game. Even as he moved across the state with his work - Mr Humphries is an engineer - he recalls how cricket was the most loved of summer sports: a ground dedicated to cricket alone in Traralgon for example.

"The senior grades were played predominantly on coir matting wickets, but Traralgon had an overlap called Duncan Cameron Park," he says.

"It was the old brick works excavation site, ceded it to the association and the council jointly. I think that's how it worked, but it was solely for cricket, no football, no other sport, just cricket. Every club, their senior side played two games a season on the turf wicket at Duncan Cameron."

After playing in the Bairnsdale and Pyramid Hill & District cricket associations, where he first got a taste for administering the game by writing a constitution for the league and playing for Dingee for two seasons, he came to Beaufort for his first season in 1988, a club which has played in several associations but is now firmly in the Maryborough and District Association.

Peter Humphries became secretary of the association in 2000. He says the greatest changes in the game he's seen are in the administrative field rather than the sport itself, with the new Associations Incorporation Reform Act 2012 removing the insurance and liability issues which once could fall on a player.

"I'd also say what's happening about now, and I'm no great favourite of it, but it's the flavour of the month, and if we're trying to attract people into cricket, I think we've got to run with flavour of the month: T20, one-day cricket, coloured clothing - lot of these things.

"There are a number of issues facing cricket now. The primary one is competition from other sports, like basketball. Tennis is probably in the same position that cricket's in; probably in a worse position than cricket.

"Changes in work practice: people do more weekend work, people do more shift work, you'll find that they're available one week and not available the next. All of those sorts of things are happening. To a degree they happen at a pace greater than an association can actually keep up with. You find it's upon you, it's already occurring.

"What we've done over time is introduce things like a changeover 12^th and 13^th man, so sides aren't penalised. And if you've got two guys who can't turn up one week, you let (the subs) play and they just take over a bowler and a batsman. It gives the other nine people and the 11 on the other side the opportunity to play a two-day game.

"At Beaufort, we went from four senior sides and a junior side. We slowly dropped back senior sides, and as you drop back the number of sides, you drop opportunities for people. We ended up with an A-grade side; we played a number of seasons where we only had A-Reserve. Then we had a time when we had no senior cricket side at all. The club didn't disband, but all we had was back in those days was Milo cricket for five- year-olds and upwards, which I ran for three seasons. That was the only cricket played. And we picked up from there.

"The future of the game is obviously having lots of kids interested. There is a natural attrition that happens, and people fall by the wayside, other things take their interest. In any one year, if you have 15 kids playing at under-15 level, in 10 years time when those kids are 24-25, if you've still got two playing for the club, you've probably done fairly well."

The other pressure on country cricket is the pressure from councils to relinquish turf wickets, because they are expensive to maintain. Can cricket keep its turf heritage?

"I think we can," Mr Humphries says.

"I suspect that if we are going to provide pathways for junior cricketers who really aspire to play cricket at the highest possible level, we are obliged to have turf wickets. It's a very difficult thing to maintain a turf wicket. At Beaufort we're spending $15,000 on rejuvenating our 10-year-old turf.

"It's thatched so it has to be taken off - it's $15,000 to take 75mm off, replace the turf and roll out new turf, doing two wickets at a time. The thing about turt wickets is each wicket is unique to the ground it's played on and the little microclimate it's in. I think into the future Cricket Australia and Cricket Victoria, the various peak state cricketing bodies, are going to have to take on board turf management.

"Because even if local councils do turf management, they don't necessarily have someone who is versed in turf in terms of cricket wickets. They might have people who are well-informed about how to keep the general ovals in good nick. But that level of horticultural experience focused on turf wickets isn't necessarily there."

Synthetics are not necessarily the answer, he says, with the cost of a synthetic green for a bowls club being about $270,000. That offers around a 10-year lifespan because of UV degradation, before the synthetic grass needs replacement. A cricket wicket in the middle of a ground used for football in winter has a shorter life, due to sand ingress and abrasion.

"You're going to have to look at replacing it about every five to six years because of that," Mr Humphries says.