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It’s tempting to get overly emotional about a cricket ground that holds such treasured memories for a nation’s sporting identity.
The WACA has always been a ground that captured the imagination of the cricketing world. The paciest, bounciest wicket on the planet. A place where balls regularly fizz past the batsmen, and are taken by the wicketkeeper above head height.
That is what cricket in Australia really is.
I was never old enough to watch Lillee and Thompson bowl on the hallowed surface, but I saw plenty of McGrath, Gillespie, Lee and more recently Mitchell Johnson.
The big lefty’s two great matches at the ground will live long in the memory. 2010-11 against England, where he took 6-38 and swung the ball prodigiously with the Fremantle Doctor, just another great feature of this ground.
And 8-62 against South Africa, where it was sheer pace and variety that shifted a vast majority of the Proteas top, lower and middle order.
For me, it’s Johnson’s hauls that signalled the WACA’s return to its glory, after years of mutterings that the fiercest tiger of world pitches had lost its teeth. And it will be those bowling performances I tell my bored children about when they ask what the WACA was.
The place where opposition batsmen shuddered at the treatment they were in for, and the place where opposition fast bowlers would lick their lips before being plundered to all parts of the ground.
The WACA scoreboard
But the WACA also contains a trap for visiting players. Despite its pace and bounce, bowling short will see you hitting the pickets more times than hitting the batsmen.
For this is where Australians have cut their teeth in Shield cricket. Fast, bouncy wickets are where batsmen like Michael Slater, Justin Langer and more recently David Warner prosper.
When you see people like Dennis Lillee, a born and bred Western Australian who relished the WACA’s conditions, walking away from an administrative position because they can’t stand to see their beloved ground be moved on in lieu of a brand-spanking, shiny 60,000-seater with all the modern bells and whistles a stadium should have.
No Adelaide Oval treatment for Lillee’s beloved WACA.
Having never been to the WACA, it’s hard for me to comment on the ground’s facilities. In cricketing terms, however, there is not a uniquely more Australian ground than the one currently being used in Perth.
The pitch sums up Australian cricket in a 22-by-3 yard strip of hard turf, and a southwesterly wind.
That’s not to say the new ground won’t share the same characteristics. It will have a drop-in pitch, a purist’s nightmare but arguably a better way of cultivating cricket wickets. The question still lingers in every cricket fan’s mind: how can a new ground have the personality the WACA did?
The Gabba, the only possible contender for the prototypical Australian cricket wicket, looked like it could have taken the mantle in recent times. It never quite did though.
For whatever reason, and it has to be a cocktail of evidence and emotion, the WACA is still the strip that inspires fear in opposing batsmen.
Decline is inevitable. As early as 2017 we could have Test matches being played at the new venue in Perth. It’s not a bad thing. Test cricket will still come to Perth.
However, there’s still that connection, even through the television, that viewers hold with the WACA. It inspires cricket lovers. It terrifies batsmen. And it’s been around so long.
Enjoy it while you can.
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