Farewell to the ‘Gabbatoir’ – concrete fortress that inspired dread in even the best
The Gabba’s 101-year reign – scene of some of England’s most crushing Ashes defeats since 1931 – faces an unexpected ending after the 2032 Olympics, all because of a phone call nine years ago by a sportswriter from The Australian.
Sports journalists are accustomed to their words not having much impact at all, but when The Australian’s decorated sportswriter Wayne Smith wrote a column about the potential for Brisbane and the Olympics and followed it up with a phone call to Brisbane lord mayor Graham Quirk in the early months of 2015, it set in train a series of events that will culminate with the curtain falling on one of the most historic and storied of all Ashes venues.
The Gabba has hosted 67 men’s Tests since 1931, 22 of them involving England, and it has been home to some of the most famous of all Ashes contests, from the Bodyline Test of 1933, the first between Australia and England at the ground and won by England, to the previous one four years ago, under Covid restrictions, when Rory Burns lost his leg stump to the first ball of the game and England slumped to defeat. The end is near, though, now and the ground will be finally decommissioned after the 2032 Olympics.
Smith, who died in 2023, was a passionate Queenslander and his suggestion, urging an Olympic bid to showcase a region of Australia other than Victoria and NSW, prompted the local mayors in Queensland to get their act together. That drive and determination was further encouraged when the IOC changed its rules to allow for regional as well as city bids; four years ago, Brisbane and the wider Queensland region was announced as the host for 2032.
Initially, the aim was to redevelop the Gabba as the Olympic stadium but that was scrapped in favour of plans for a new $A3.7b venue at Victoria Park, about 6km across the river from the Gabba.
The capacity will be 63,000 and the new stadium will become home to both summer and winter sports, cricket and AFL, and to Test cricket. Assuming cricket is still on the Olympic calendar in 2032, the last shot played at the Gabba will be the final of that event. The Gabba’s immediate future seems to be uncertain after this Test, but there is a chance that whoever is captain of England for the 2029 Ashes will be the last to toss up at this famous old ground, following in the footsteps of the first England captain to do so, Douglas Jardine, and many subsequently, such as Len Hutton and Nasser Hussain, for whom the place haunted a slice of their dreams.
For a long time in its early history, the Gabba was derided as one of the least impressive of Australian Test grounds and it always had a plain feel to it. In a history of Queensland cricket, an early scene was described thus: “A decaying white picket fence surrounded the playing area but, on top of the picket fence, was a wire fence topped with strands of barbed wire.” It was barbed wire that kept the public from mixing with players and members and, open to the elements, there was little shade for them, either.
Richard Whitehead’s excellent recent retelling of the 1954-55 tour, led by Hutton, outlines the touring team’s dissatisfaction with the facilities two decades after the Gabba’s debut on the circuit. He noted that for the state match against Queensland, the nets at the Gabba were found to be unsuitable and the players relocated to a nearby school. He quotes England’s Frank Tyson, who described the pavilion as “antique” and London journalist Alan Ross, who wrote of the pavilion having all the “dignity of a lavatory”.
The dressing rooms were spartan, adorned with a trestle table and six-inch nails knocked into the walls for clothes pegs. Tyson bemoaned the lack of fridge, although there was an iron bathtub in which drinks were kept cool by large blocks of ice. In that famous 1954-55 Test, when Hutton inserted Australia to disastrous effect, England’s main four fast bowlers sent down 126 eight-ball overs between them. That primitive ice bath would have been a godsend.
A redevelopment of the ground came during my career and in the 1990s, turning it into the “Gabbatoir” of modern legend; a featureless concrete bowl, with its cavernous underground dressing rooms, where Kevin Pietersen vividly described the dread of waiting to face Mitchell Johnson in 2013-14.
One end of the ground is called the Vulture St end, named after one of the busy roads that skirt the stadium, but a fitting one given how often Australia have picked away at touring teams: this has been their stronghold, recording a long unbeaten stretch between 1989 and 2019.
England have a particularly gruesome record here, having won only four times, twice since World War II and not since the 1986-87 tour.
The roll call of calamities since then are not hard to recall: Hussain’s invitation for Australia to bat first in 2002-03, which backfired spectacularly; Steve Harmison’s gentle first-ball loosener that ended up in the hands of second slip in 2006-07; Johnson’s dismantling of England’s batting and spirit in 2013-14, and Burns’s miscalculation of his whereabouts at the crease, four years ago.
Personal memories. In 1990-91, pre-Shane Warne, the pitch was green and damp; four years later, with Warne ascendant, it was dry and bare. His flipper to bowl Alec Stewart in that 1994 Test was one of the great feats of deception. In a low-scoring game in 1990-91, we were ahead on first innings, and then on the Saturday evening Kerry Packer invited Allan Lamb, the stand-in captain and not out overnight, and David Gower, the senior pro, to a casino on the Gold Coast, an hour away. Lamb did not last long the next morning; nor did the game.
Despite the regeneration, other grounds have now surpassed it and the Gabba, as one local journalist put it to me, is the ground Australian cricket left behind. Its capacity, 37,000, is small by Australian standards, and the facilities do not compare to, say, the revamped Adelaide Oval or the new Perth Stadium. Still, what it lacks in niceties, it usually makes up for in other ways: the atmosphere often has a visceral feel about it – think the Western Terrace at Headingley, or the Hollies at Edgbaston – something with which, for one more Gabba Test at least, England’s players will have to contend.
The Times
The story goes that it started with a phone call.