The Melbourne Cricket Club (MCC) is a sporting club based in Melbourne, Australia. It was founded in 1838 and is regarded as the oldest sporting club in Australia.
The MCC is responsible for management and development of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, a power given to it by the government-appointed MCG Trust and an Act of Parliament. This also guarantees the club's occupation of about 20 per cent of the stadium for its members reserve.
In 1859, the MCC was involved in the drafting of the first set of rules for Australian rules football and, in 1877, hosted the first game of Test cricket in history - played between Australia and England. In 1971, the ground hosted the first One Day International cricket match.
As well as cricket, the MCC is also an umbrella organisation for other sports - golf, lacrosse, baseball, tennis, lawn bowls, real tennis, shooting, field hockey and squash. Since 2009 the Melbourne Football Club has been the footballing division of the club having previously been part of the club from 1889 to 1980.
Read more about Melbourne Cricket Club: Membership, Reciprocal Clubs, Cricket "Team of The Century"
Famous quotes containing the words cricket and/or club:
“All cries are thin and terse;
The field has droned the summer’s final mass;
A cricket like a dwindled hearse
Crawls from the dry grass.”
—Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)
“The barriers of conventionality have been raised so high, and so strangely cemented by long existence, that the only hope of overthrowing them exists in the union of numbers linked together by common opinion and effort ... the united watchword of thousands would strike at the foundation of the false system and annihilate it.”
—Mme. Ellen Louise Demorest 1824–1898, U.S. women’s magazine editor and woman’s club movement pioneer. Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly and Mirror of Fashions, p. 203 (January 1870)