When George Orwell wrote that “even a leisurely game like cricket, demanding grace rather than strength, can cause much ill-will”, he had in mind the acrimony aroused by the Bodyline series, rather than slanging matches between Australian state leaders.
Key points:
- SA Premier Peter Malinauskas has been critical of the mid-week, post-Christmas scheduling of the recent Adelaide Test
- He said Adelaide Oval had attracted more fans in just over two days than what Perth’s new stadium managed in four
- The comparison has raised the ire of some in the west, including Perth’s lord mayor
But cricket’s power to a provoke a tongue-in-cheek turf war has been exemplified again in recent days by fallout from the Adelaide Test, with the SA premier and Perth’s lord mayor both taking to social media for an exchange of barbs, including a threat to poach the popular AFL Gather Round.
For the past few weeks, SA Premier Peter Malinauskas has been on the warpath about the scheduling of the Adelaide Test and the choice of opposition, accusing administrators of treating local cricket fans “with contempt”.
“I’m fired up about this,” Mr Malinauskas told ABC Sport’s commentator Andrew Moore during the lunchbreak on Wednesday.
“We played West Indies last year and here we are, less than 12 months later, playing them again, which means an active decision was made to deny us Pakistan … [who] of course have a higher ranking than the West Indies.
“I think that’s incredibly poor form.”
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Mr Malinauskas, who expressed a preference for a pre-Christmas Test time slot, said he was especially disappointed the Test had begun on a Wednesday — a decision that, given the match’s duration of just over two days, has ended up preventing the possibility of a weekend attendance.
When asked what he thought of “day one of the first Test of the summer in Perth, at that 60,000-seat stadium, and 16,000 people turned up”, Mr Malinauskas asserted that Adelaide would have “eclipsed” that figure, and administrators had “reaped what they sowed”.
“I think Cricket Australia made a decision [to] go over to Perth, and flog a dead horse over there, because they’ve got form, and have very few people turn up on day one of the Test,” he said.
“If that Test had have been in Adelaide starting on a Thursday, we would have eclipsed the crowd.”
But the remarks did not escape the attention of those in the west, with Christina Matthews — who recently announced she was stepping down as WA Cricket’s CEO after 12 years in the role — describing the criticism as “nasty”.
“Us outliers, South Australia and Perth, we should be banding together against the evil of the east,” she told ABC Perth.
Mr Malinauskas recently doubled down by posting on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) a comparison of the Perth and Adelaide crowd numbers.
“Adelaide got a bigger crowd for 2 hours of cricket today than Perth did on all of Day One against a higher ranked opponent,” he wrote.
It was that comment that saw Basil Zempilas enter the fray, with the Perth lord mayor threatening to make efforts to poach the AFL’s Gather Round from South Australia.
“Calm the farm Premier or we’ll come after Gather Round,” he remarked.
“I admire the parochialism and celebration of a day three cricket crowd, wonderful, well done. But over here we like to rejoice in things like our state’s contribution to the nation’s economy.”
While Matthews conceded she “would have loved to have seen” more than 20,000 on day one at Perth’s new stadium, she said that the “numbers are going in the right direction” after the disappointment of missing out on Test matches against England and India in the past few years.
“If you look at our BBL crowds, there is no doubt that this a cricket-loving state and we just have to take a long game to building those crowds at Test cricket,” she said.
“South Australia have the luxury of a very strong membership base, and a very historically-large membership base.
“The crowds that they bring in are predominantly their own members and not newcomers to cricket, whereas we probably work the other way — a smaller member attendance, a larger public attendance.”
Cross-state rivalries aside, Mr Malinauskas said his focus for next summer was securing a fixture that local cricket fans would find agreeable.
“I’m probably more interested in actually what we do from this point forward than I am about complaining about the situation we’ve got ourselves in this year,” he said.
“One of the things that’s been mooted is the possibility of the Adelaide Test having its own special spot in the calendar … later in the month of December, across the weekend immediately prior to Christmas.”
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