Welcome to the Gabbatoir

If Prince Charles was a cricket fan, the Gabba would be the sort of venue he’d deride as a “monstrous carbuncle”. It is functional, practical and ghastly on the eye, a towering ring of concrete that sticks two fingers up at aesthetics, and concentrates entirely on the business of subjugation. No ground in the country better epitomises the Australian sporting mentality.

Its role as host of the first Test of an Australian summer owes as much to practicality as tradition, seeing as Brisbane’s tropical heat is simply too oppressive any later in the year, but as a venue in which to set the season’s agenda, it is unrivalled. A holding pen on Ellis Island has a more accommodating vibe.

It’s not merely the size and shape of the venue that is awesome. The Melbourne Ground Cricket, after all, has more than twice the capacity, but the G has a status more akin to a cathedral, set as it is in the heart of a park in the heart of the city, with the banks of the Yarra providing an anachronistically bucolic vibe.

The Gabba, on the other hand, neither seeks nor offers any such saving graces. It is parked in the midst of a motorway in the industrial wastelands of Brisbane’s south side, with the evocative Stanley and Vulture streets thundering past on either side. It is what it is – its nearest neighbours are a shabby Seven-11 and the down-at-heel German Club, a venue that falls someway short of the oasis promised by the aboriginal origin of “Woolloongabba” – place of many watering holes.

Sentiment can go hang at such a venue. Australia win here with a regularity that is never less than contemptuous – since the start of their unbeaten run in 1989, they’ve won six Tests by an innings, three by 10 wickets and a further seven by more than 100 runs. But they haven’t been afraid of tampering with their formula along the way, and since the completion of the amphitheatre rebuild in 2005, Australia haven’t let slip so much as a draw.

Visiting teams might think they’d prefer to rewind to less built-up times, when the contempt of the crowd didn’t rain down from three tiers in the manner it does now, and the mind’s eye still harks back to the hill and dog track that were features of the Gabba of old. And yet to judge by the opinion of those who visited the ground before its redevelopment, there never really was a golden age of the Gabba.

“The ground depresses,” wrote John Kay, the Brighton Argus correspondent who toured with Freddie Brown’s team in 1950-51. “It is not a cricket ground at all. It is a concentration camp! Wire fences abound. Spectators are herded and sorted out into lots as though for all the world this was a slave market and not a game of cricket. The stands are of wood and filthy to sit on. The dining rooms are barns, without a touch of colour or a picture on the wall. Everywhere there is dust and dirt...

“Forgive me if I am bitter about the Woolloongabba ground,” he added. “The city has many good points, and the people who live there are generous and hospitable to the highest degree, but once one goes to the cricket ground the advantages are overwhelmingly lost in the mass of rules and regulations.”

And sure enough, in keeping with a near-uniform tradition of English defeat in Brisbane, the 1950 fixture was lost by 70 runs, after a tropical storm created such a sticky dog of a wicket that England declared their first innings on 68 for 7, in the hope that they could torpedo Australia while it dried. It worked up to a point, as the Aussies themselves slumped to 32 for 7 before declaring, but Len Hutton’s brilliant second-innings 62 not out couldn’t stave off the inevitable.