Victoria

The team's origins date back to the very start of Australian cricket when the Melbourne Cricket Club (MCC) was formed in 1838, and in that same year an MCC team played its first match against the Victorian Military. However, the first official inter-colonial (now interstate) game was contested between Port Phillip and Van Diemen's Land in 1851, in Launceston. Victoria was the dominant force in the early days of Australian first-class cricket, winning two of the first three Sheffield Shield tournaments, and most of its early domestic friendly games against the other states.

The first game between the great rivals Victoria and New South Wales was played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) in 1856. The annual Sheffield Shield tournament initially began in the 1892/93 season, contested by Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia. Victoria won that tournament by defeating both opponents twice each.

During the history of the Shield, Victoria has won the competition 32 times, most recently in the 2018/19 season. The Victorian Cricket Association, now Cricket Victoria, was founded in 1895 and since March 2018 has been based at its headquarters, the CitiPower Centre in St Kilda. Victoria has featured a significant number of cricketing greats, such as Warwick Armstrong, Bill Woodfull, Bill Ponsford, Neil Harvey, Hugh Trumble, Lindsay Hassett, Dean Jones, Jack Blackham, Jack Ryder, Bill Lawry, Bob Cowper, Shane Warne, Keith Miller and Ian Redpath.

(See here for a full listing of past players). Victoria has been a powerful force in Australian cricket and the Australian cricket team has, at least until recent decades, never been short of Victorians in the line up. The tradition of starting a cricket match at the MCG on Boxing Day also featured Victoria when they played New South Wales in 1965.

Victoria is the only first-class cricket team to have scored over 1,000 in an innings, which it achieved twice in the 1920s – 1,023 against Tasmania in 1922–23, and 1,107 against New South Wales in 1926–27.