A new era for the Adelaide Oval

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2013/dec/06/a-new-era-for-the-adelaide-oval

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Just as Australia was once a collection of six separate states with their own identities and idiosyncrasies, its Test cricket venues were also distinct in their virtues and unique in aesthetic. In their place we now have a mostly interchangeable collection of mega-stadia; homogenous and characterless grandstands that nevertheless acknowledge the needs of modern sport, not to mention the posteriors of spectators.

The move away from local flavour did not come with a recognisable demarcation point like Federation, it evolved at the languid pace of hot summer days and across the breadth of a nation’s cricket history. In recent times, only Adelaide and Sydney could truly lay claim to a point of differentiation and maintenance of tradition. Adelaide was always just different. It was beautiful.

Now, cricket continues to acknowledge realities, conceding ground and reaching mutually beneficial compromise with its sporting competitors. After enjoying a monopoly on the Adelaide Oval for so long, cricket now shifts to the status of co-tenant of the revamped ground. In actual fact the chief beneficiary of its dramatic redevelopment will be the state’s two Australian Rules football teams, Adelaide and Port Adelaide.

The sight that cricket fans took in on day one of this Ashes Test was many lifetimes away from that which confronted Billy Murdoch’s Australians and Arthur Shrewsbury’s Englishmen for Adelaide’s inaugural Test of 1884. The Riverbank Footbridge, incomplete but temporarily opened for the Test, now connects the ground with the city and nearby public transport. The grandstand of the same name offers views of not only the on-field action, but a look back across the cityscape behind.

It drew the Australian’s Andrew Faulkner to wonder whether the Cathedral End of the ground would still be spoken of thus now that St Paul’s has been obscured by a glossy new grandstand. It’s one of several new quirks that will take some adjusting to.

Still, nods to the past can be seen throughout the reboot. An as yet unnamed southern stand sits in place of the old Bradman stand and was completed with only days to spare before the current Test. Fittingly, Bradman’s name now adorns the pavilion housing the changerooms and player viewing area. One stand on the Western side bears the Chappell name and the other still that of Sir Edwin Smith. All offer superior capacity and increased comfort from those they replace.

Ian Chappell spoke warmly of the honour, adding that his late mother Jeanne would have been glad to know that the gates named for her father Victor Richardson keep their place among several familiar sights. The grand and enduring scoreboard of 1911 remains immune to the fickle fashions of intervening years. In contrast, a modern digital flat screen sitting beside it cannot even hope to compete, like a paperback copy of The Da Vinci Code sharing shelf space with a first-edition volume of Shakespeare. Both serve their purpose.

All in all, it would be fair to say that the works to rejuvenate the ground have been far less an imposition to locals than the shift away from the traditional Australia Day Test schedule to an early-December fixture. Those late January encounters of days gone by were once set in stone on calendars in Adelaide and its surrounds.

Chappell took a pragmatic view of the changes to the ground, arguing “there’ll be people who complain that it’s not what it used to be but you’ve got to move on, you’ve got to give people facilities that they’ll like and you’ve also got to have facilities that bring in extra revenue.”

He was equally unfussed on the topic of the drop-in pitch and said “this is the same thing I’ve seen at the Adelaide Oval for 40-odd years now.” Never one to rest on sentiment, Chappell applauded the return to the ground of the local football code, noting that football’s shift away was nothing more than “a battle of egos” between Sir Donald Bradman and former SANFL president Don Brebner.

Though a South Australian import, Bradman was a staunch advocate of the ground’s beauty and grandeur. No doubt its undeniable Englishness appealed to the Anglophile in Bradman. In Farewell to Cricket in 1950, he said the ground “would gain top marks if one considered the natural beauty of its environment,” particularly the surrounding parklands and gardens, as well as the “stately cathedral”, whose literal and symbolic presence he felt acted as a natural moderator of crowd behavior.

Now the ground's famous grassed hill acts as an attractive beer garden for local and visiting fans in an atmosphere that still has the vibe of a raucous garden party. The lush green of the drought-resistant santa ana couch grass retains a similarly eternal appeal.

In its time Adelaide Oval has also seen its share of iconic moments on field; Bill Woodfull absorbing the full force of Harold Larwood’s Bodyline bumpers in one of the most hostile of all Tests; Allan Border hurling a ball into the players’ viewing room floor as his side succumbed to the West Indians by one run in 1993; Mackay and Kline’s death-defying last wicket partnership to force a draw with West Indies in 1961, so long overshadowed by the tie in Brisbane but no less thrilling; not to mention Bradman’s undefeated 299 against South Africa in 1932.

Lingering a little too closely in the mind of Australians would be Faf du Plessis’s stoic resistance of last year. The spoils have always been harder to come by for bowlers.

On Thursday the first batsman to assert himself on the new-look ground was David Warner, who raced to a typically impetuous 24 runs before perishing to a rash cut shot with 24 runs to his name and plenty of others on offer.

The more that things change, the more they remain the same.

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