The 100th year of Melbourne Country Week will not feature Goulburn Murray Cricket when the competition starts on Monday.
The senior representative tournament pits the finest players from country cricket associations across Victoria against each other at the five-day carnival in Melbourne, widely regarded in years gone by as a proving ground for senior cricketers.
But a mix of rising costs and player unavailability has forced GMC to pull the pin for the second straight carnival.
It will be the fourth year the league has missed after similar issues plagued its bid to compete at the 2020 edition, with COVID-19 forcing the cancellation of the 2021 and 2022 carnivals.
GMC president Jason Turner estimates it would have cost up to $20,000 to fund the campaign.
“It's a fair bit of money to send a team down for a week and it all comes down to player availability,” Turner said.
“Most people don’t take a week off to play cricket, they’ll take it off to spend with their families. It’s different to what it was 30 years ago.
“Accommodation, travel, food, and uniforms make it quite expensive.
GMC will be joined on the sidelines by neighbouring league Cricket Shepparton, with other leagues also reportedly running into issues.
“There’s quite a lot of representative teams not going,” Turner said.
“I reckon country week is dying off a bit.
“They have floated different ideas and maybe they’ll move it to the regions. Maybe you have it in Bendigo one year and Ballarat the next.
“I think they have a lot of thinking to do about how it’s going to be run and how it’s going to move ahead ... at the end of the day, it’s the clubs that pay for it. We figured after a couple of years of COVID-19 and floods we would give it a miss and see what happens.
"Missing the first six weeks of the season to floods put a lot of clubs under financial strain.
“The league’s no different; sponsorship is back to where it was pre-COVID, but we’ve still done it fairly tough.”
Turner said the league was hopeful the team could return and would revisit the concept with clubs and players before the 2024 carnival.
In the meantime, GMC’s focus will remain on nurturing its up-and-coming junior representatives.
“We would prefer to develop kids than send down a senior team,” Turner said.
“As far as we’re concerned, the future is the kids, and if quality senior players aren’t available we’re probably better off filtering that money back through the kids."
At the 2019 Melbourne Country Week, GMC fell to Ballarat in the division two semi-finals.