10 January 2006 and Boof, Mumbles, Sloon, HumptyDoo, Tickets, Walt and Jack for the Redbacks take on the Western Warriors in the KFC Twenty20 Big Bash at Oval on a big night out. Diz scratched, sensible man. 14,298 people rock up and plenty of them munch their way through mountains of hamburgers, pies, chips, magnum and cornetto ice creams, and wash it all down with beers, cokes and maybe a glass of wine or two. Out in the middle blokes have bats and a ball in their hands but you have to wonder what for. I leave early and into journalist (and former player) Alan Shiell. He remarks on my going and I say ‘I’ve seen it once and once is enough’. He says ‘that’s a fair call’, shakes his head, and adds there's nothing to interpret, you may as well just print the scores’. The Australian attempts a national interpretation in its editorial the next day:

As abominations go, Twenty20 is a lot of fun. The record crowd of 40,000 who turned out at to watch Australia teach South Africa a lesson on Monday had a great time. But a lesson in what? Not in the cunning and craft that every Test player needs, or even the tactics, energy and ingenuity it takes to succeed in the one-day game. That’s because Twenty20 requires a different skill set. With each side facing 20 overs, it is a game for broad shouldered batsmen, whose idea of finesse is to swing, run and hope for the best. And one for bowlers who can accept seeing balls that would be treated respectfully in a Test walloped with a cross bat. What we saw on Monday was a good-natured circus. .. . Purists have all the evidence they need to revile it. But people who don’t take their sport all that seriously will probably love it.2

Mainstream sports start out as amusements. Kicking or throwing a stone, maybe catching it or hitting it with a stick. Games often see the use of informal systems of rules and some degree of etiquette but when they become sports they are more formal. This is evolution and going up the scale the highest form in cricket is the Test match. One-day cricket has its place but at the international level it is devolution, the tasty hamburger versus the gourmet slow-cooked meal. Twenty20 represents a further drop. It might be ‘finger-lickin’ good but the burnt chook that falls off the barbie into the sand is an acquired taste which better bred dogs would not touch. You cannot argue that Kentucky Fried Chicken might find value in being a sponsor but to think that the 10 January crowd was the biggest at a domestic cricket match since 17,777 went to see hunt down a world record of seven consecutive first-class centuries in a Shield match against , and fall 95 runs short, defies belief. When was that again? Oh, yeah! - 25 February 1939 Let us take another date. 13 December 1873 when British-born South Australians take on those born in the colony. The British are out on a 'lumpy pitch' for 95 and the Colonials after tumbling to 8-75 reply with 142 to win convincingly. Whoever kept for the British had a hard day as top score for the Colonials was sundries with 30, of which 27 were byes. Let us also check the names of the team members. Among the British we have Warburton, Lynn, Gooden, Morcom, Gosse, Robinson, Lungley, Joyner, Colyer, Green, and Scott. Among the Colonials are Bright, Giles, Featherstone, King, Cole, Spiller, Pickering, Davenport, James and Ayers.3 How many might be your ancestors? How many of your ancestors perhaps played in South Australia’s first representative match when twenty-two of its men took on W.G. Grace’s All England Eleven at the end of March 1874? I will not list all the names. Suffice to say they made 63 and 82 to be defeated by the eleven who made 108 and 3-38. The most spectacular feat in the match, however, was the performance of Alex Crooks who caught out W.G. for 6, and was perhaps then a victim of the Peter Principle of his day by being promoted too readily beyond the level of his competence. Crooks had opened the in the first and was out for 0 but might have celebrated his catch too hard for he was listed absent ill 0’ in the second innings. Whatever skill Crooks had as a cricketer it put him in contact with the social elite of the South Australian Cricketing Association, particularly after he became the SACA's treasurer later the same year, a position he held until he resigned in 1885 before his career collapsed as a result of a financial scandal. He turned out to be aptly named. In 1879 Crooks was employed as an accountant by the newly established Commercial Bank of South Australia and a year later became manager. The bank expanded rapidly but Adelaide’s business community was shocked in February 1886 when the bank suspended trading and three days later Crooks was arrested for engaging in speculative lending to prominent businessmen and later charged with embezzling £5000. Defended by fellow SACA member (and future) premier , Crooks pleaded guilty and was sentenced to eight years hard labour at Yatala prison.4 Let us look at another early international match. 10 November 1882 and the English team led by the Hon. Ivo Bligh landed at Glenelg on the P&O steamer Peshawar ten days late. The players rushed to their city hotels to change and then went to to start play against a South Australian Fifteen. The match was well contested for two days but then Bligh was instructed by Cricket Club secretary Ben Wardill to gather his team together, and reboard his ship for Melbourne. Not only was the SACA committee offended by the rushed departure, a banquet was cancelled, and worse still, ‘the gentlemen members of the team, who had been elected honorary members of the Adelaide Club, were unable to use the facilities’.5 The oval was used a lot for club cricket in its early years and in the 1876-77 season all club cricket was programmed on the oval and the adjacent Neutral Ground or what became known as the No 2 ground. Two years later when the Neutral Ground was in a poor state matches were played simultaneously on the main oval with pitches prepared to the north and south of the centre of the ground with a across the middle. Although there was a regular criticism of the practice, the half-ground matches continued until 1899 when local grounds were established by the district-based clubs. However, the last A grade matches continued to be played on the divided ground until 1919. Later several club games would be played on the full oval each season but with the increase of first-class matches from 1970 club cricket has been sparsely rationed although it is made available for finals.6 10 November 1877 saw the first first-class match begin on South Australian soil. It came about indirectly following an invitation by the Queen and Albert Association of Port Adelaide to the Launceston Cricket Club to inaugurate their new ground at Alberton. After the game the SACA arranged a new match against the SA team. After the home side scored 182 the Tasmanians were dismissed for 72 in what was supposed to be a timeless match. The following day an irregular occurrence was the selection of a new pitch despite the fact that it had played well until late on the first day. The Tasmanians were then put out again for 97 which gave the South Australians a comprehensive win by an innings and 13 runs. John Bevan captured 14 for 59 in his only game for the colony. It is hard to know how much this match set back the cause of Tasmanian cricket but they did not play at again in a first-class match until March 1936 when Don Bradman took 369 off their attack and their subsequent defeat by an innings and 349 runs set them back for another quarter of a . On 7 March 1878 St Peter’s College and met on the oval in the first intercollegiate game and as the Advertiser reported it was103 degrees in the shade and 151 degrees in the open. Saints made 84 of which 10 were wides but Princes wilted to be out for 37 in a game played in a single afternoon. From then on matches moved to late November or early December. Saints bowlers did their share of wilting when future Test stars made 252 against them in 1886, topped that with 360 retired six years later (358 is sometimes mentioned), and future state player Charles Dolling weighed in with 311 in 1904. Matches had become timeless when Keith Gogler recorded Saints highest individual score of 205 in 1940 but the seven day marathon of 1941 was the end of such games. Nearly all matches between the schools were played on the oval up to that time but the last at the ground was in 1954 when Saints’ Ian McLachlan was well and truly man of the match with 142 and 11 wickets for 138. What became of his leg breaks?7 12 December 1884 and the first Test played saw 's money-grubbing Australian ‘amateurs’ take on ’s English professionals and cause the SACA to lose heavily on the event which England won by eight wickets. The Australians were certainly not very ‘professional’ in their approach to the game as only Percy McDonnell, and bothered practising before the game. It paid off for those three as McDonnell (124 & 83), Blackham (66 in the first innings) and Giffen (47 in the second) made more than 20. Murdoch was probably practising something else as he was only four days married to winsome Jemima Watson, an heiress and amateur actress’ and he made just 5 and 7. Murdoch’s men continued to strike a hard financial bargain for the following Melbourne Test and when the refused to meet their terms the whole side mutinied and eleven new men took their place. The Adelaide Test has become the principal event in the local cricket calendar even though for the first forty years or so it generally only came about once every four years when English teams toured. There have now been 66 Tests staged at the oval (including two women's Tests in 1949 and 1958) and there have been other famous dates. Like 14 January 1933 when 50,962 patrons on the second day attended to watch England start play at 7-236, be dismissed for 341, and reduce Australia to 4-109 after captain was struck the heart by Harold Larwood and Douglas Jardine called up the Bodyline field for the next ball. The first day had seen Tim Wall (who may have taught and/or coached some of you) take two early wickets as England slumped to 4-30 before their recovery. England won the best attended oval Test of all time by 338 runs.8 A couple more dates: 1 February 1961 and 113.1 eight ball overs are delivered by the West Indies and and Lindsay Kline battle out nearly the whole last session to draw the game; and 26 January 1993, an Australia Day that went wrong as Craig McDermott and Tim May fought hard for victory against the West Indies but the world champions sneaked home by 1 run.9

Most top cricket on the ground has been for the Sheffield Shield and Pura Cup and the very first Sheffield Shield match of all began on the oval on 16 December 1892 with George Giffen obtaining the first in the competition when he dismissed New South Wales opener for 0 with the third ball of the game. SA won the match by 57 runs and because the original rules of the competition devised it as a challenge trophy became the first winners of the shield. In fact, the shield itself was still being designed, and a couple of weeks later the rules changed to award the trophy to the colony which led the competition at the end of the season. Victoria won in 1891-92 but South Australia was the first to receive the shield after its 1892-93 victory, the presentation being made by Sir Edwin Smith on the oval in July 1893 during the half-time break of a Norwood-Port Adelaide football match. Don Bradman made his first appearance at the oval for New South Wales on 16 December 1927 ( 118) and his last for South Australia on 8 March 1949. In between he made 4863 runs at an average of 89.63 in 40 first-class games.10 One-day international cricket made its first appearance at the ground when Australia played the West Indies on 20 December 1975 but was seen as an unwelcome intrusion into the Test series. Since then there have been 59 further games with those on Australia Day frequently being sold out. Perhaps the most remarkable match was that of 24 January 1999 when after Sri Lankan spin bowler was no-balled for throwing against England his team was able to chase down an improbable victory target of 303 runs. A lot of other types of cricket have been played on the ground over time but those like North v South intracolonial games disappeared before the end of the nineteenth century. Country Carnivals certainly used the oval and until the 1960s the association carnivals used the split ground format after which the north and south pitches were removed at the request of the South Australian National Football League. Social games such as the long-standing Parliament v Press fixture and various commercial bodies have long since ceased to use the main ground. In the modern era the main minor form of the game played on the ground surface is Kanga Cricket with hundreds of children taking part, usually on major match days. Just recently I was walking to my office when I spied what looked like elevated tennis umpires chairs underneath the works area behind the Sir Donald Bradman Stand. I assumed they were being painted by our staff painter for use in the Australian Hardcourt tournament, which was due to begin that week. They were painted but a day later they had a Beach Cricket logo on the side, suggesting another hybrid form of the game. And then the thought hit me: will it become an Olympic sport? Will beach cricket cease to be a game and what sort of crowds will it draw? If it becomes popular will it transfer to the oval and will young women in bikinis raise its profile as they have done for beach volleyball? Do not underestimate the powers of marketing and with drop-in pitches and drop-down tennis courts anything is possible in modern Australian sport. Remember when Yevgeny Kafelnikov complained of a Davis Cup tie played on the equivalent of a football field but who won and who lost so what the heck? Piles of sand lumped on to the so-called sacred turf of Adelaide Oval would not be too hard to manage. Certainly, it would be a lot easier for curator Les Burdett and his crew than growing pitches in glasshouses in the middle of central Victorian winters and then transferring them on road transports to Telstra Dome. And then I had a dream or was it a nightmare? I dreamt about Ten10. Twenty20 may be a bit drawn out for future concentration spans so why not reduce the game to ten overs a side. Every player (except the keeper) bowls one over and each pair of batsmen retires after two. The umpires take up their usual positions only there are eskies at each bowler’s wicket for the umpire to flip open a can for the bowler to signify that the over has been completed. There are also two barbies. The square leg umpire takes care of turning the chops and snags at one end while at the other the extra cover fielder prevents the fare from charring. (Note: my dream was restricted to right-hand batsmen only.) The position reverses at the end of the over and every player gets a feed. Is this the way to go? We shall see! I must admit I am not alone with such projection. The Melbourne Age satirist Andrew Dyson has taken arithmetical possibilities further to Five5 and one presumes even more immediate gratification until we finally reach the logical endpoint of ZeroO, the point when cricket ceases to exist at all. Bernard Whimpress Adelaide Oval Museum Notes: I A version of this paper was delivered to the Adelaide Club on 14 February 2006 2. Australian, 11 January 2006, p. 13 3. Register, 15 December 1873. 4. Australian Dictionary of Biography Supplement 1580-1980. (2005) Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, p. 88 5. C. Harte with B Whimpress. (2003), A History of Australian Cricket, Carlton Books, p. 128. 6. G. Sando (edited and assisted by Bernard Whimpress). (1997) Grass Roots: 100 Years of District Cricket 1897-1997, South Australian Cricket Association, p. 48 7. J Curtis, etal. (1978), 1878-1978: 100 Years of Intercollegiate Cricket, Adelaide. 8 Wall was for many years a geography master and cricket coach at St Peter s College 9. B Whimpress and N Hart (1984) Adelaide Oval 1884-1984, Wakefield Press, Adelaide 10. B. Whimpress. (2005), Bradman at Adelaide Oval: A match by match record, Adelaide.