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There is a small strip of greeny brown grass in a frame inside the members' section of the Gabba cricket ground.
A few years ago, someone saw fit to dig up a portion of the wicket of the hallowed Brisbane turf and put it on display for all to see. There aren't any visible blood spatters, sweat, or tears discernible to the naked eye, but you just know they are there. This, after all, is the 'Gabbatoir', so often a place of slaughter for English cricketers.
The Gabba is Australia's fortress.
They have chalked up 42 victories from the 67 Tests played there. Of all the regular Test venues Down Under, the Gabba has the best win-loss ratio for Australia of any that have hosted more than 20 matches. England know that all too well. Their record in their past nine visits to Brisbane is dismal: lost seven, drawn two, won none.
It has been 39 long years since they last triumphed here, when Ian Botham's century and Graham Dilley's bowling inspired a seven-wicket victory. Chris Broad, Stuart's father, hit the winning runs.
David Gower, scorer of 404 runs at 57.71 in England's 2-1 Ashes series victory on that 1986-87 tour, tells The Athletic how emerging onto the Gabba pitch in front of thousands of baying Aussie fans -- the heat, the humidity, the hostile din -- could easily make English players cower and quail, while also having the opposite effect on the home side.
"I've seen Allan Border, you know, 5ft 7in when he emerges onto the field... but by the time he got out to the middle, he looked about 6ft 6in and 4ft wide," he says. "He really was someone who drew inspiration and strength from the atmosphere created by the Gabba crowd."
The Gabba is situated in Brisbane's suburb of Woolloongabba, an Aboriginal term meaning 'whirling waters', and is nowadays a hulking but slightly creaking 42,000-seater concrete and steel coliseum. It staged its first Test in 1931 and, more usually, is the scene of the opening match in an Ashes series -- this is the first time since 1982 that the venue has hosted the second rather than the first Test between Australia and England -- and, therefore, a first taste of the real heat and conflict for the English.
Forebodingly, one of the bowling ends is called Vulture Street -- you can well believe it -- and the Brisbane River, named the 'Brown Snake' by locals for its twisting nature and murky hue, winds its way around the stadium.
As Neville Cardus put it for the Guardian upon surveying the Gabba on the morning of the 1936 Ashes series, "We are a long way from the green fields of Hampshire and cricket's cradle." Then again, Cardus also wrote, in his 1937 book Australian Summer, that Ernie McCormick's dismissal of the tourists' Stan Worthington with the first ball of the series was "bowled like a hurricane".
Anyone who has since seen the actual footage of that dismissal might accuse dear old Neville of something approaching hyperbole.
There was no exaggeration necessary to describe the horror of Simon Jones' injury on the Gabba outfield on the first day of the 2002 Ashes series. Chasing a ball to the mid-off boundary, Jones went to retrieve a Ricky Ponting drive with a slide, and his right knee jammed into the turf. Jones ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament and was in agony.
"Get up you weak pommie bastard!" Jones recalls an Aussie fan shouting at him as he was carried from the pitch on a stretcher in his award-winning 2015 book, The Test.
"I see his face and never forget it, a face burned into my mind. Pissed... leering... gloating. He pulls back his arm and throws a half-full beer can at me."
Jones' misery compounded the decision by Nasser Hussain, England's captain and now a columnist at The Athletic, to bowl first after winning the toss. Australia ended the first day on 364-2, with Matthew Hayden, a Queenslander, unbeaten on 186 and Ricky Ponting only recently dismissed for 123.
"I was trying to reinvent the wheel and that decision was made simply because of a scrambled brain," said Hussain. "Injuries had hit us hard and I feared we didn't have a bowling attack that could take 20 wickets against that Australian side in Australia. So I was looking for something in the pitch that wasn't there and made completely the wrong decision.
"Within an hour, I knew I'd got it wrong. I don't mind it coming up now on TV. I tell the story myself, too. It didn't cost us the series or even that Test. We were just playing against a better side than us and we needed everything to go our way if we were going to compete. And things just didn't go our way."
Hayden, speaking to Hussain and Mike Atherton's Sky Sports Cricket podcast, chuckled at the memories of that day. "You could see how an overseas captain could make that call," he said. "I told you who jumped off the boat as soon as they were serving up the cocktails: (his fellow opener) Justin Langer. He got 32, a mid-score, but he had a strike rate just south of 90 (per 100 balls). He was creaming it. He just thought: 'I'm going to cash in on poor Nasser's bad call here'.
"I hadn't spoken to (the England fast bowler) Andy Caddick and, at one point that day, I said to him: 'G'day mate, how you going?'. And he took it as a slur. 'How do you think I'm going?'. That was probably fair enough, given Ponting and Hayden at the crease were starting to inflict some serious squeeze. But I remember walking into the dressing room furious because I actually was being sincere and asking him how he was doing.
"Play's over that day and I tore up the dressing room. I said: 'I swear boys, I'm not going to be happy until English bowlers' feet are bleeding'."
The hosts ended up winning that Test by 384 runs, bowling the tourists out for 79 in their second innings. They went on to claim the series 4-1.
The former England opener Mark Stoneman had his first taste of the Ashes at the Gabba in the 2017-18 series, where he was playing his first overseas Test and scored 53 in the visitors' first innings. Australia won that match by 10 wickets.
"It was so intense," he tells The Athletic. "Hot, muggy, really loud. Thankfully, the Barmy Army were in great voice, too, and you do really need that travelling support. I always think it's what the Coliseum in Ancient Rome must've been like, only with more beers."
Stoneman remembers wondering why the Australian wicketkeeper and slip cordon were standing so far back as Alastair Cook prepared to face the first ball of the match. Sixteen balls in, he found out, as Cook's edge was snaffled by Peter Handscomb at first slip.
The pace and bounce have discomforted tourists too often here.
It was at this ground that Jeff Thomson unleashed his terrifying trebuchet of a bowling action in 1974, obliterating England's top three in his first-innings 3-59 and then taking 6-46, including five of the top seven, in the second. "I looked on in awe," recalled Australia's then captain Ian Chappell of Thomson's spell in his 2012 book, Chappelli.
Wicketkeeper Rod Marsh felt the speed. Taking a Thomson bouncer in his gloves, he started wringing his hand in pain. Marsh then realised the implications for England's batters. "Hell, that hurt," he said to Chappell, "but I love it."
Grim parallels can be drawn for the English sides of 1974-75 and those of 2013-14. Where Dennis Lillee and Thomson blew England away in the former, it was Mitchell Johnson who terrified England's line-up 39 years later. In both series, a group of experienced batters were shaken to their core. Neither would recover from the physical and accompanying psychological effects of the barrages they received during the first match of the series at the Gabba.
"It was horrible to watch," Kevin Pietersen wrote of Jonathan Trott's implosion at the hands of Johnson at Brisbane in Trott's searingly honest 2016 autobiography, Unguarded.
The rest of the England line-up hardly fared any better in Brisbane or for the rest of the series -- they lost 5-0 -- but Trott was also struggling hugely with his mental health at the time. Johnson's hostility and use of the short ball "blew the foundations away from under him", Pietersen recalls. Trott faced 28 deliveries in that match and was dismissed twice. He did not feature again on the tour.
So is the Gabba the most hostile place for an Englishman to play at?
"Ah, look," says Mike Hussey, "the Aussie crowds, they don't mind giving the opposition a fair bit of stick, especially to the poms. So if it's the first time you're experiencing it, it is a bit of an eye-opener, I guess."
Hussey doesn't believe the Gabba is more hostile than other Australian grounds, particularly the 80,000-seater Melbourne Cricket Ground, once famed for its notoriously bellicose 'Bay 13'. He does, however, think the conditions at the Gabba are particularly tough for visiting players, especially if they haven't grown used to the conditions beforehand.
"Brisbane is humid and hot and it swings around," he says. "It's also still got that fast bouncy pitch. It's pretty challenging. I'd probably say it is more the conditions that make it really tough for opposition teams."
Might England having had a tune-up in Perth on a lively pitch in the first Test stand them in good stead for this second match at the Gabba?
Hussey thinks for a moment. He isn't exactly categorical. "I think so. Maybe? I mean, the Gabba won't be as fast and bouncy as the Perth pitch, so it'll probably feel like a small step down, but it'll still have plenty of bounce. So, I don't know... as long as England can make their adjustments quite quickly. I expect that it's not going to be a very long Test match again, whatever happens."
Whisper it, but Australia's chokehold on opposition teams in Brisbane has been prised slightly looser of late.
Unbeaten in 31 Tests at the Gabba between 1988 and 2021, they have only won two of their last five matches at the venue. Their two defeats came at the hands of India in 2021 and the West Indies in 2024.
Rishabh Pant's final day 89 not out, with a startling acceleration in the last session, secured India the Border-Gavaskar after India hauled down a target of 329 on the final day.
More pertinently for England, West Indies' win was achieved in a pink-ball match, Shamar Joseph charging in with a crushed toe to take seven wickets and secure his side their first Test victory in Australia since 1997. A feat that brought the commentating Brian Lara to tears.
The statistics provide some hope for England, too, if that's your thing. Australia have averaged 29.5 runs per wicket with the bat at Gabba this decade; that's a significant drop off, having averaged 49.2 per wicket there in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s combined.
The 2010-11 draw at the Gabba, secured by Cook's indefatigable second innings score of 235 along with centuries for Andrew Strauss and Trott, remains a high watermark for English sides at the ground in the past three decades.
The Gabba's iconic multicoloured seats were designed by a computer algorithm. They are supposed to give the effect of a fuller crowd when the stadium isn't at full capacity. They didn't do too good a job during the latter stages of England's dogged fightback in 2010, though, with David 'Bumble' Lloyd, commentating for Sky, memorably quipping: "I didn't know it was fancy dress today... the crowd had come dressed as the seats".
England escaped with a draw and duly showed Australia that they were up for the fight. "They really did," concurs Hussey, who played in that match and scored 195 in Australia's first innings. "I remember thinking after that match, 'OK, these guys are different, they are going to give us a run for it'."
England won the series 3-1. It remains their most recent Ashes away victory.
"It's really intense at the Gabba," says Steven Finn, who took six wickets at the venue in 2010. "In that atmosphere, it is easy to just fall like a pack of cards. But if you stand up and fight, and push back against Australia in those scenarios, you gain the respect of the public over there."
Ben Stokes' England will have to resist Mitchell Starc, the best pink-ball bowler in the world.
Asked ahead of the crucial second Test whether the Gabba holds any fear for him and his side, England's captain was typically unequivocal. "It doesn't, no," he said in his pre-match press conference this week. "Obviously, records for teams go back a long, long time. Many teams have gone to the Gabba and lost to Australia, but this is a brand new outfit.
"Lots of (our) guys are on their first Ashes tour, so this is going to be a new experience for them. So no, it doesn't hold fear. But you also understand that Australia know this is a very good ground for them."
The Gabba remains a fortress, even if it has shown signs of crumbling in recent memory. It is scheduled to be demolished after the 2032 Olympic Games, to be replaced by a new 63,000-seat stadium at Brisbane's Victoria Park.
When the time comes and the pickaxes and shovels swoop, it's unlikely England's cricketers will be clamouring for a piece of its storied turf.