Larissa Reserve

Larissa Reserve does not chase a bigger club or a bigger crowd. It exists for one tenant, North Sunshine Eagles FC, who have called the St Albans ground home since 1991, and the numbers on the gate reflect that — a thousand seats is enough for a suburban Melbourne club that has never needed more.

What sets the reserve apart from the district grounds around it is the traffic it has quietly carried without becoming anyone's permanent second home. Between 2021 and 2022, Western United sent their reserve sides here — the NPL 3 squad and the U21s — along with the odd cup fixture, borrowing the pitch while their own machinery sat elsewhere in the competition pyramid. It was never a groundshare in the usual sense, just a top-flight club's development teams turning up on a Tuesday night to a ground built for none of that.

The pitch itself is unremarkable in the best way for a club level ground: natural grass, kept to the size and shape a reserve fixture needs rather than anything built for spectacle. There is no clean record of when the ground was first laid out — an old Football Victoria licensing document from 2000 carries the phrase "Established 1973," but that line refers to a kit supplier's history, not the reserve's, so the opening date stays unclear rather than invented.

For North Sunshine Eagles, the arrangement has simply held for over three decades, which on the Melbourne amateur circuit counts as its own kind of stability.