EXPECT plenty of fireworks when Moonee Valley Council debates the controversial proposal to relocate the Essendon Cricket Club to Fairbairn Park tonight.
Word out of Kellaway Avenue is that the council is deeply divided on the issue which flared after the cricket club, under pressure to leave Windy Hill, refused to shift to Cross Keys Reserve and searched for another home.
The residents' lobby group will make their presence felt tonight when the council votes on the issue.
The football club has tried for 40 years to throw the cricketers off Windy Hill.
If the council backs the residents tonight, the cricketers won't be going anywhere.
The football club has the bowls club in its sights as well, as they plead for Federal Government funding.
It's over the top to suggest Windy Hill is in 'dire' need of redevelopment as reported over the weekend.
If the football club gets its way, they will pay a hefty price - $1million dollars plus ongoing maintenance and water supply for the cricketers. And there's $230,000 for another wicket and changeroom at Cross Keys because some Fairbairn Park tenants will be forced to transfer some games there.
Go, Red Breasts!
CURRENT generation of Essendon supporters have always known the team as 'The Bombers'.
A century ago they were the 'Same Old' and in-between 'The Dons'.
A fourth name fashionable around the 1940s was quietly buried and is no longer politically correct. But did any of us know that in the 1930s, the footballers were also known as the 'Red Breasts'?
Essendon Rotarians discovered the reference in local newspaper reports of the club's matches in 1935, during research for Rotary's 75th anniversary celebrations in May.
None of the golden oldies at Windy Hill can remember the team being called the Red Breasts and it even escaped the attention of revered writer Michael Maplestone who wrote the club's history Flying High.
Obviously the name didn't catch on. Not surprising, given this was also the era when the Hawks were called the Mayblooms!
Signs gone, finally
VICROADS has belatedly removed its advertising signs bragging about the installation of new pedestrian traffic lights. Only 15 months after the work was completed ...
There might now be some hope that signs erected by Essendon station and in Buckley Street next to Steeles Creek might also be taken down.
The traffic light installation at the station and the footpath re-development in West Essendon were finished more than a year ago.
Long-suffering Buckley Street motorists will be delighted that the schools' underpass will be opened on Thursday, according to the council's website, and the busy arterial might return to normality. The area has been a major traffic hazard for most of the past two years. A decade or more back the community respected the roads authority but it's all been downhill since.
The final word
IF at first you don't succeed, destroy all the evidence that you tried.
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