Australian cricket’s famous “Gabbatoir” in Brisbane has moved another step closer to being scrapped as a Test venue altogether.
In conjunction with the Brisbane Lions, the 2024 AFL champions who call the Gabba home, Cricket Australia has pulled together a proposal for a new stadium in the city’s Victoria Park that would host cricket and Australian rules football for the next 50 years.
The Gabba has hosted Test matches since 1931 and the proposal is that its cricketing life ends 101 years later at the 2032 Brisbane Olympics.
The ground has become infamously tired, and its precarious status as the fifth Test venue in Australia was clear when CA bumped it from its usual season-opening spot in favour of the new Optus Stadium in Perth. It was then handed a day-night Test for next year’s Ashes because Adelaide Oval wanted a day game in the prime slot just before Christmas. The Melbourne Cricket Ground and Sydney Cricket Ground remain in their trademark Boxing Day and New Year’s slots respectively.
Australia do not yet have any Tests scheduled at the Gabba beyond next summer because of the uncertainty around its future. Not having a Test in the 2026-27 summer will break a run of 49 consecutive summers of Test action at the ground.
Nick Hockley, the outgoing CA chief executive, said the Gabba was “coming to the end of its useful life” so cricket and AFL authorities have submitted their proposal to the Queensland government’s 100-day Olympic venue review.
“The Gabba has played a pivotal role in Queensland cricket history and we’re delighted by the strong ticket sales for this Test,” Hockley told The Courier-Mail. “That said, it’s clear the Gabba is coming to the end of its useful life and the Brisbane 2032 Games presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to develop a world-class stadium that delivers strong legacy benefits for Queensland, by providing cricket and football fans with the facilities that they deserve.
“Hopefully, this latest review will provide the certainty that everyone is craving, not least the Games organisers and together with Queensland Cricket, the AFL and the Lions, we will be making a strong case for a new stadium that can accommodate cricket and Australian rules football at Victoria Park into the future.
“It would be amazing to host the Olympic cricket finals at the Gabba and then move straight into a brilliant new stadium where fans can enjoy international and domestic cricket in comfort for the next 50 years or more.
“This would also avoid disruption and costs to fans and the sports from any displacement from the Gabba between now and the Games.
“The lack of clarity about elements of the Olympic and Paralympic Games infrastructure has certainly caused a level of frustration and uncertainty for sports played at the Gabba.
“Queensland is an enormously important market for cricket, so it was unfortunate we could only plan for the next two years of international cricket in Brisbane in our seven-year international schedule.”
The Gabba has a capacity of only 37,000, making it the smallest of Australia’s five main Test venues, and small by AFL standards, too. A new stadium is also being built in Hobart that will host a new AFL team, as well as some international cricket, in place of the characterful Bellerive Oval.
The latest chapter in an epic Australia-India series is being held at the Gabba this weekend.
England’s poor record at the Gabba makes this good news
The writing is now on the wall for the Gabba – and no cricket team should be more pleased than England.
The very fact that next winter’s Ashes series will not begin at a ground that has terrorised them felt a major boost to England’s chances when that news emerged in recent months. Now, it looks like their visit for the second Test this time next year will be the last time they ever have to go.
England have a truly dreadful record at the Gabba. They have not won a Test there since 1986 and it has largely been a fortress for Australia, who did not lose to anyone in Brisbane between 1989 and 2019 (although they have since lost to both India and the West Indies).
England’s Ashes horror shows spring to mind easily: Nasser Hussain electing to bowl first in 2002 (Australia reached stumps on day one on 364 for two, and won by 384 runs); Steve Harmison’s first-ball wide landing in his captain Freddie Flintoff’s hands at second slip in 2006; In 2013, Mitchell Johnson terrorising England, with Jonathan Trott forced home with a stress-related illness; in 2017, Jonny Bairstow erroneously being accused of butting Cameron Bancroft weeks earlier; and memorably, Rory Burns’s first-ball duck in 2021, bowled behind his legs by Mitchell Starc.
England never recovered, and were drubbed in each of those series. Defeat in Brisbane tends to set the tone for the tourists’ travails.
It is a long time since the Gabba could be considered a great ground. Its facilities are poor for the modern era and it is rough and ready. Remarkably, by Australian standards, it is small, too. It would easily have the biggest capacity of a cricket venue in England, a land of grounds, not stadiums.
What it does have, though, is character and almost 100 years of cricketing history, which any slick, sanitised new multi-purpose stadium in Brisbane will have no chance of replicating. That is sad – although not for England.
Article courtesy of
Source link
