Soon, the Fremantle Doctor will no longer drift across Test match cricket. We’ll have to merely remember the nervous scrape of the batsman’s spikes as he shuffled back and across to some outrageous lifter or the thwack of another ball flying high towards third man.
Time then to reflect on the Waca Ground’s many storied moments since it started hosting Tests in the summer of 1970-71. In the intervening time the iconic but not always loved venue has produced a quite compelling bank of sun-drenched memories and myths – that pitch of sandy-white autobahn-grade tarmac, whose cracks opened like ravines and offered the kind of trampolining bounce that ensured even modest pacemen the ability to whistle the ball past batsmen’s ears.
At least we’ve got the memories. Does any fast bowling spell of the last 25 years boast a set of numbers as ominous and darkly comic as Curtly Ambrose’s 7 for 1 in the space of 32 deliveries in the 1993 Test? That breathtaking performance razed Australia from 85-2 and a sense of respectability to 119 all out and a crushing series loss. The groundsman was promptly asked to pack up his belongings.
West Indian pacemen had an unfortunate habit of lording it over the Aussies in Perth, of course. Nine years before Ambrose’s frightening spell, Michael Holding mustered 6-21 as Australia crumbled to 76 in the first innings. That was when the Waca’s name was most onomatopoeic, bringing to mind broken ribs and clattered helmets. Effects microphones never told such a harrowing tale as here. Only Barbados – the home of Garner and Marshall – could match the Waca for that fear factor and the sense that things could get out of control. Maybe it was the extremities of the environment that produced such belligerent cricket to match it.
Then there was Perth’s favourite son Dennis Lillee, watching on in horror as his Western Australian team-mates were dismantled for a paltry 77 in the 1976 Gilette Cup semi-final and then slicing into Queensland’s batting order like a hot blade through butter. In that Waca ‘Miracle Match’ Lillee produced one of the most compelling spells of fast bowling ever seen in the domestic game and an over to Viv Richards so menacing and impactful as to warrant book-length dissections.
The Waca pitch could often be the 23rd player in the game and occasionally the most important one. The seeds of its success, both figuratively and literally, can be traced back to its former live-in curator Roy Abbott, formerly a cattle-station hand and prisoner of war in Crete, who for 33 years fed it the seemingly magical Harvey-Waroona soil that produced rock hard, lightning fast, “skiddy” pitches beloved of bouncer-happy fast bowlers and batsmen who were happy to camp on the back foot all day.
Then World Series Cricket’s drop-in pitch wizard John Maley took over, having just revolutionised the way curators thought about creating strips. Maley is one of the greatest cricket innovators whose name is barely known. Before his discovery by Kerry Packer, he’d thought himself a decent prospect as an attacking opening batsman, the kind that might have thrived on the Waca after a session or two of acclimatisation. Once the World Series finished, the pick of the country’s curating jobs saw him lob in Perth. With his scraggy beard it was often remarked that he looked like a mad scientist, an idea that might also have gained traction with ducking and weaving batsmen.
But when it came to taking the reins from Abbott, Maley was left with little in the way of instructions from the old-timer (he found better answers listening in on fast bowlers) and soon after taking the job, it became clear that the pitch’s glory days were done. Those Harvey-Waroona soil stocks were long since gone and Maley’s black-soil replacement looked OK to begin with (plenty of the vital clay component required) but was soon found to contain too much sodium. Sodium makes pitches crack. This, Maley told cricket writer Peter English, was the most unlucky thing to ever happen to him. In came Tony Greig, his car keys and the birth of another legend. By 1988, Maley was gone, taking a job at Hale School. “I did my own 13 years’ solitary confinement for stuffing up the Waca,” he told English.
If it was difficult going at times, it’s also beyond doubt that batting at the Waca brought the best out of many Test batsmen, demanding from them patience, perseverance, pragmatism, bravery and not a little amount of skill, a decent enough checklist of the desired character traits that give Test cricket its name.
“If you see out the first 30-minute ‘adjustment phase’,” Steve Waugh once wrote, “it suddenly transforms into the flattest batting track of them all.” He thought that the canyon-like cracks Maley’s soil tended to produce were more a psychological menace than anything.
Danger still lurked closely. Waugh was on hand during the 1988-89 Waca Test to see team-mate Geoff Lawson cop a vicious, rearing Curtly Ambrose bouncer to the face, one of the most haunting pieces of sporting theatre the surface produced. The damage to Lawson’s broken jaw was thought by team physio Errol Alcott to resemble something closer to an injury sustained in a car crash.
As far as the myths of the pitch, it’s worth noting that Perth also produced a few docile wickets over the years as well. A case in point was the 1982-83 Ashes model on which Chris Tavare crawled to 89 in 466 minutes of batting abstinence. In the second innings Tavare took 64 deliveries just to get off the mark, but even then there was the spectre of danger in the form of a drunk and unruly crowd, one of whom Australian paceman Terry Alderman infamously tackled to the ground, dislocating his shoulder. Twenty-six spectators were arrested in the ensuing chaos. The Waca crowd could be as wild and wooly as the cricket.
As far as Waca barrages go, Mike Denness’s 1974-75 English tourists sustained as harrowing a spell of fast bowling as any. Having already lost John Edrich and Dennis Amiss to broken hands at Brisbane courtesy of Lillee and Thomson’s blitzkrieg, they had to issue an emergency call to 41-year-old Colin Cowdrey, who abandoned his Christmas turkey to face the fearsome duo in harsh surrounds. With nothing but an MCC touring cap for protection the old stager gave a remarkable account of himself, scoring a two-hour 22 in the first innings and 41 streaky runs in the second as ball after ball cannoned into his well-upholstered frame. By this point Thomson, noted the cricket writer Ray Robinson, tended to turn thigh pads into Vienna schnitzel.
Cowdrey, looking like some well-meaning tourist who’d accidentally stumbled into a biker bar, never flinched, but none of the rib-rattling blows he received was worse than that suffered by his second innings opening partner David Lloyd. Facing up to Thomson’s thunderbolts and with a mixture of shock and laughter emanating from the packed crowd, Lloyd was struck a cruel and sickening blow to the nether regions. “The batsman assumed the configuration of a hairpin,” wrote former England paceman Frank Tyson, “and slowly, stiffly toppled forward on his head, motionless on the popping crease.” After spending close to 10 minutes in a crumpled heap, Lloyd retired as hurt as any batsman could be.
With painful incidents like this in mind, you’d have to say that batting feats at the Waca perhaps stand out a little more for the odds against which they were achieved. A century at Perth has always been a feather in the touring batsman’s cap.
You think of Ben Stokes’s coming-of-age 120 in the 2013 Ashes or Lou Vincent’s youthful exuberance in 2001, though neither went as hard as Roy Fredericks taking the 1975 Australians for 169 blistering runs, 100 of them coming in 71 deliveries of sustained carnage to set up his side’s only win of the series. That was a sharp turning point in West Indies cricket. They wouldn’t lose a Test series again for 20 years, in which time the Waca became a graveyard for local batsmen.
Then there was Chris Broad’s 162 in 1986, all the more mighty for the fact that the Waca’s infamous nets had left him battered, shell-shocked and questioning his worth as a batsman before the game had even started. Others managed feats of similar poignance; baby-faced Tendulkar clubbing 114 in 1991-92 to signal his ominous potential; Graham Thorpe’s magnificent and vain 123 in ‘94-95, Brian Lara’s feisty, drought-breaking 132 in ’97 when he’d gone 18 months without a Test hundred; Chris Gayle’s ridicu-ton of 2009; the Amla-De Villiers batting masterclass of 2012.
Winners more often than not, Australia’s batsmen have also made their mark; Greg Chappell’s assured century on both his and the ground’s Test debut of 1970, made when batting in Perth was still thought a breeze; older brother Ian’s stunning command of Roberts and Holding in ‘75; senior citizen Bob Simpson’s 176 against India during the Packer years; Brad Hodge’s haunting, undefeated 203 to scream into the void against South Africa in 2005; Adam Gilchrist’s 57-ball wonder-ton in the Ashes of 06-07; Michael Slater’s dazzling 219 to beat up Sri Lanka in ’95 as debutant Ricky Ponting fell four agonising runs short of a debut century; David Warner’s 180-run assault on India 2012; Matthew Hayden’s world-record 380 against Zimbabwe. Bowlers didn’t always win the day.
The Waca has also been host to plenty of the wonderful and weird, like Alan Hurst’s contentious “Mankad” of Pakistani Sikander Bakht in 1979 (in home-town hero Kim Hughes’s first game as Australian captain, no less). It was also where Lillee unfurled his infamous aluminum bat and later tangled with Javed Miandad in scenes befitting a WCW wrestling bout. Most quirkily, the Waca is also the only venue at which Alastair Cook watched a Test as spectator before playing in one.
But those are all just factoids and lists. The physical beauty of the Waca, if you could call it that, lay in its pitch certainly and the perma-sun, but also the hodge-podge of architecture – a bit of brutalism here, a traditional scoreboard there – and its jarring idiosyncrasies in a world of homogenised modern super-stadia. Slabs of grey, sun-scorched concrete and vast stretches of unsheltered outer now probably rank as a far harder sell to the average punter though, you’d assume. What made it unique is what’s also made it obsolete.
After a few “al fresco” years in which scribes sometimes needed to place laptops in nearby fridges for fear of combustion, journalists now mostly sit in double-glazed, air-conditioned comfort at the Waca, with flat-screen TVs always in view. Sadly, this sort of setup in homes across Australia now provides a far more compelling proposition to the eager cricket fan than spending eight hours frying in summer’s harshest heat. This is a battle that all cricket venues face.
The Waca’s other eternal problem was that it sat in no man’s land; a little too shabby for major events, not antique or precious enough to be worthy of the teary-eyed lament drawn by Adelaide and Melbourne’s redevelopments. Neither boutique nor grand, its charms are a little like rotary phones or analog cameras – quirky but not functional. Progress lays elsewhere, at Burswood and beyond. Want to see a glorious bronze statue of Lillee striding through the crease? Look outside the MCG, not the Waca. The old scoreboard, built in 1954 and then shifted in the ‘80s, is the kind of not-quite-tradition that characterises the entire ground.
Putting aside the local disappointment at its demise as a Test venue, the Waca’s fate also represents a significant loss to non-Western-Australian fans down under too. For all the recent noise about night Tests being shown at ratings-friendly times for time-poor working cricket fans, Perth’s Test had always been a joy to nine-to-fivers in eastern states, who’d get home from work and still see the lion’s share of the day’s play live.
Burswood might fill that same timeslot but it can’t ever hope to match the Waca’s very essence – the blood and thunder that’s the antithesis of modern cricket’s one-paced slogathons. In an era of pedestrianisation the Waca pitch was a highway to hell. With its demise Test cricket continues its gradual creep towards globalised uniformity, its physical setting and permutations perhaps a little blander.
Worse, there had actually been hope along the way. In 2013 a major redevelopment plan linking the upgrade of ground facilities to commercial and residential development was mooted but fell over through lack of interest, thus can’t be classified as bad luck. As sad as it is, neither can the Waca’s demise at large.
When you think of the Waca now you’re inevitably drawn to the past, perhaps that classic Mark Ray photo of Doug Walters stooped forward in the press box during the 1993 Test – cigarettes close by, form guide at the ready and the races playing on a boxy old TV with a transistor radio on top – a man out of time in a venue that’s also now a strange, living heritage piece.
At Burswood, patrons will be more comfortable. Food stalls will be as plentiful as sheltered seating and a new generation of families will file through the gates and create their own memories. This is progress and it’ll make financial sense, even if everything special and unique about the Waca lingers as a lump in the throat of traditionalists.
But what is tradition? Back in the 1950s and prior, decades before Western Australia even had a Test to call its own, touring English cricketers would dock first at Fremantle, briefly bask in the sun and then move eastward for more serious cricketing engagements. That gentle era was replaced by something far less civil, a thrilling and dangerous type of cricket borne of looser and less polite times. What comes next, you feel, will just as equally reflect the times.
