Once more at ‘the WACA’, with feeling

The Western Australia Cricket Association Ground in East Perth – ‘the WACA’, as it’s always been known as decreed by the Australian Constitution and the MCC Laws of Cricket – has evolved over time into one of the worst cricket venues on earth, if we’re really honest.

It’s old. It’s tired. It’s run down. It’s a ram-shackle collection of stands and structures that don’t seem to fit in with anything built there previously. It’s hot. It’s excruciatingly hot. It’s sweat-behind-the-knees hot.

And I absolutely love it. Some of my earliest memories watching Test cricket come from matches played in Perth.

I can still recall Dennis Lillee and Javed Miandad almost coming to blows; an incident that still looks bizarre 36 years later. It was November 1981, in fact, and after Miandad turned Lillee square of the wicket and ran down the pitch watching the ball, the Pakistan Captain and the great Australian quick came together.

Both men shoved the other, and as umpire Tony Crafter came between them, Lillee kicked Miandad’s pad, prompting the mercurial batsman to load up his bat like a tennis serve.

It remains one of the iconic cricket images of that time, and was rightly described in Wisden as “one of the most undignified incidents in Test history.” With no such thing as an ICC Code of Conduct back then – can you imagine the size of the fine and length of suspension if that sort of thing happened now? – the Australian players fined Lillee $200 and maintained he had been provoked.

Re-watching the vision while writing this, it’s hard to see anyone but Lillee doing any provoking.

Like any cricket-obsessed kid did, I read every cricket book I could, and the tale of Doug Walters’ hundred in a session against England in 1974 sticks out. Even though his playing career ended around the time my love of the game blossomed, I don’t actually have a memory of Walters playing for Australia.

But the century after Tea is enshrined into Australian cricket folklore now, and inevitably raised whenever a player gets close to matching the feat. Needing three off the last ball of the day to reach his hundred, Walters pulled Bob Willis over midwicket and just walked off. There wasn’t even a bat raised before he was mobbed!

Walters’ knock came the summer before a pitch invader ‘knocked’ Terry Alderman in the back of the head during the 1982 Ashes Test, leading to Alderman’s infamous shoulder dislocation. They were wild times at the WACA back then.

The ground grew lights in the mid-1980s – which if you look closely aren’t actually evenly spaced around the ground – in time for the America’s Cup defence off Fremantle, commemorated by a four-team standalone tournament featuring Australia, England, Pakistan and the West Indies. It was also the time when day/night games in Perth would finish the next day in the eastern states. TV has put paid to that in recent years.

Matthew Hayden cashed in on Zimbabwe’s ambitious call to send Australia in after winning the toss; we all assumed his 380 would never be broken, but Hayden’s record didn’t even last the end of that 2003/2004 season.

Recollections of Dougie’s ton immediately brings up the more recent memory of Adam Gilchrist falling one shy of beating Viv Richards’ 57-ball record for the fastest Test century, against England in 2006. Everyone remembers Gilchrist smoking Monty Panesar to all parts of the ground, but my memory of that knock was of England captain Andrew Flintoff craning his neck to watch a six go over his head, mouth agape.

Then of course, Gilchrist’s carnage leads into David Warner ploughing into the Indian attack in 2012, where he reached three figures in a comparatively glacial 69 balls. His love affair of the WACA has continued unabated since, where he’s averaged 89 since that first Perth Test.

The last time England played at the WACA, Ryan Harris did what Ryan Harris does. His first ball dismissal of Alastair Cook in the second innings was a thing of beauty; discussed just this week among a couple of Roar regulars of questionable repute as being in the Warne-to-Gatting stratosphere.

I’d like to try and disagree with the hint of hyperbole, but I just can’t. And in that same Test, we saw ‘our George’ Bailey laying into Jimmy Anderson to the tune of 27 runs in one over, an innings that remains his Test highlight.

Back to Harris, his destruction of England in 2013 brings me to my one and only visit to the ground, where Harris again tore through the Old Enemy to put Australia back into the 2010-11 series. Michael Hussey batted superbly to make a century in Australia’s second innings, compiling big partnerships with Shane Watson (95) and Steve Smith (36 – but who I have no memory of playing this game at all), and England were set 391 to win and almost seven sessions to get them.

Harris got Cook early, and then after nightwatchman Anderson took a single from the second last ball, removed Paul Collingwood from the last ball of Day 3. He clean bowled Anderson the next morning, dispatched Ian Bell and Matt Prior in the space of four balls, and returned late in the innings to claim Steve Finn as his sixth victim. It was all over in ten overs on Day 4, leaving me with a day and half to kill in this wonderful city.

And though it was scorching hot all that week, it was probably the highlight if my Ashes series tour that summer. A group of English and Australian colleagues met up for an impromptu dinner before we all left, and we all remain in contact and still laugh about the night seven years on.

Sadly, after this match, Ashes Tests will be played over the river at the impressive-looking sparkly new Perth Stadium, and the WACA will be reserved for First Class games and Tests against lesser-drawing teams.

The new stadium will have all the creature comforts, but it won’t be the WACA. Everything will look great because it was designed to look great. The WACA is great because the Lillee-Marsh Stand looks nothing even remotely like the Inverarity Stand. No-one really cares.

(Photo: Wiki Commons)

Whether the drop-in wicket at the new stadium can take all the Western Australian characteristics with it remains to be seen, but for now, we have the next few days to remember the heady days of the WACA, where the cricket was a bit wild, and the wicket was “whored and forced”, as Billy Birmingham’s timeless Tony Greig impression reminded us.

Australia could wrap up the Ashes this week and break the deadlock that currently sits at 32 series wins apiece.

And if they do, they’ll take a little piece of the legend that is the WACA with them.