It usually all ends in tears at the WACA
It WAS, said Colin Cowdrey, the ‘most generous act I ever knew in cricket’. the year was 1974-75, the venue Perth, and the temperature rising. Amid it all, David ‘Bumble’ Lloyd was feeling protective.
At the grand old age of 41, Cowdrey had been flown out to Australia ahead of the second test at the WACA as cover, and immediately found himself thrust in at No 3 against the X-rated pace of Dennis Lillee and Jeff thomson. His attempt to greet thomson with a handshake had not gone down well.
Out in the middle, Lloyd told him: ‘You stay up that end against Max Walker, because it’s all going off down this end.’
Cowdrey was touched. Perth was more like a trampoline than a cricket pitch, and the Australians smelled Pommie blood. In the circumstances, his innings of 22 and 41 were little short of heroic.
Welcome to the Western Australian Cricket Association, known to friends and foe as the WACA. Even the acronym is chilling, with its faint promise of violence. And, as England’s 1974- 75 tourists discovered, that violence tends to be dished out by the Australians.
For all the pre- series talk of Fortress Gabba, it is in Perth — more than 2,000 miles away from Brisbane on Australia’s west coast — that England’s Ashes hopes have often crashed.
In 13 tests there, they have won just once, and that was in 1978-79, when Australia’s best players had been looted by Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket. Among major test venues, England have a lower win percentage only at St John’s in Antigua, though even there they managed to draw three out of seven.
At Perth they have lost their last seven tests. Even in 201011, when Andrew Strauss’s side won three games by an innings, they left the WACA defeated.
ALL too often, England have been psyched out — by the bounce, the hostility and the blinding Western Australian light.
What happened to Bumble in that Cowdrey match, when thomson broke his inadequate pink box, causing it to crack open then snap shut again ‘like a guillotine’, remains the most vivid example of the physical danger synonymous with Perth.
But few moments were more worrying than the blow struck in 2002 by Brett Lee on Alex tudor, who thought he had lost an eye after ducking into a bouncer. tudor was fine, but it may be no coincidence that he never played another test.
England were spooked. they sent out Richard Dawson as nightwatchman — the ultimate lamb to the slaughter — and events on the final afternoon of a game they lost by an innings and 48 runs led Michael Vaughan to suggest that Alec Stewart had exposed tudor to Lee too early in the over. Stewart disagreed. ‘I didn’t back down against Lee’s assault,’ he later wrote, but added an assessment that has become familiar down the years: ‘It was the quickest, bounciest wicket I had batted on.’
Four years later, England arrived at the WACA two-fifths of the way through what would become the first Ashes whitewash for 86 years. Only 29 behind on first innings, they watched Adam Gilchrist thrash a century in 57 balls, as Australia racked up 527 for five. Soon after, the Ashes were lost.
In 2013-14, a hundred from Ben Stokes proved that English batsmen could flourish at Perth. But England lost by 150 runs.
Of the seven games they have lost there in succession, that represents the smallest margin of defeat.
the next time England tour Australia, the Perth test will be at the new Optus Stadium, across the Swan River from the current ground. If they can close the WACA chapter with an unlikely win, English cricketers may one day look back at the old place and allow themselves a grim chuckle.