The WACA

The Western Australian Cricket Association presides over the most successful team in modern Australia. To cricket-lovers the world over, 'the WACA' is also the Association Ground - legendary for wickets of unequalled pace and bounce. Yet success on and off the field was hard won. Although the WACA is unique among its state counterparts in owning its Ground, financial necessity has demanded it be a multi-sports stadium. Even so, development brought two life-threatening crises in the early 1900s and internal tensions in the free-spending 1980s. The WACA was saved in adversity and sustained in growth by state governments conscious of cricket's power to put a remote community on the map. The same isolation shaped both the traumas and triumphs of more than a century of cricketing endeavour. Although some exceptional individuals emerged before the First World War, limited interstate competition delayed team success for another 60 years. Even after regular air transport diminished the desert barrier between Perth and Eastern Australia, inclusion in the Sheffield Shield in 1947 was on a provisional half-time basis, eventually replaced by a decade of enforced WACA subsidy of visiting state