In the upper ranks of the upper cover on Sunday, surrounded by bodies, concrete and sweat, he felt a difficult place to get lost.
Brisbane’s lions deployed their premier league flag of the AFL just before noon amid the absurd humidity, and more than 30,000 people were there to see it. Maybe there was comfort in corporate boxes, but seeing football in the Gabba on this day was going to be a challenge as important as playing it.
It may have been an extreme example, but this is what Brisbane has expected from Gabba, our Gabba.
The Sun hits the exposed seats, even in the heart of winter, and in the days when the morning rain budgets a swampy afternoon, the articulation is transformed into the largest public sauna in the world.
It is difficult to get there and, often, more difficult to leave, and the huge train station that is being built on the road will now come just in time so that everyone goes to another place.
The future of sport in Brisbane rests in Victoria Park and her new Olympic stadium. (Supplied)
It lacks the modern furniture of the Perth or Adelaide Oval stadium, the architectural splendor of the SCG or the magnitude and history of the MCG. Instead, it has multicolored seats that perhaps seem people on television when they are empty. Maybe.
But special things happen in this place, memories that will be held long after the city has packed and transferred on the river to Victoria Park in a larger, newer and surely more comfortable stadium.
Perhaps magic comes from discomfort, everything that makes it a strange and sticky sense of unity. When you have sweat during a whole day of Crickt, and then Peter Siddle takes a hat-trick on his birthday after tea, you can hug the guy by your side like a brother, because he has also gone through everything.
When you have challenged the buses and trains overload for hours just to see the lions fall 52 points against Geelong, it feels a little more miraculous when Ash McGrath completes the return in the grass in front of you.
You buy a ticket a day at Crickt knowing that the whole garden could be underwater to lunch, or painted white by a monstrous storm after tea. But if you are lucky, Steve Harmison will send the first ball to the second slide and Ricky Ponting will slide to an impeccable century for stumps.
The Olympic Games are arriving at the right time for the city of Brisbane, and although there will be headaches and complications in the seven years of coming, there are little doubt that the sports infrastructure of the city needs to progress.
Gabba’s famous drainage doing a training last summer. (ABC Sport: Jon Healy)
While the restorations in Tennyson are critical to ensure that the city has an international standard tennis installation, and although Perry Park seems to be careful mostly in another cruel blow to the future of football, the decision on Brisbane’s main oval coliseum was to be the crossing.
The deterioration of the Gabba had already seen Brisbane stripped of one of his marquee events, with Perth pinching precisely the first test of the summer and taking it west.
It may not seem much, but that test was always a source of pride for Queensland Sport and a date that was anxiously marked on the calendar. There will be no Harmy Wide or Rory burns the legs of the first ball of the Ashes series this summer, at least not a spicy gabba greentop, anyway.
The initial plan to renew the Gabba, although convenient and nostalgically satisfactory, was unattractically and logistically impossible, according to Prime Minister David Crisafulli.
Once all politicization and choice were out of the way, a new construction in Victoria Park was the only real option. On that site rests an opportunity for Brisbane to truly have a world class, with a capacity that will allow justice to the Olympic Games and see him compete with his interstate contemporaries for years beyond.
The way in which the surrounding enclosure is developed will be key, and could see that the new stadium separates from the tastes of the Perth stadium, which remains somewhat deserted. On the path of Lang Park, Cxton St Booms on the game days and each event feels like an occasion.
The lions celebrate the miracle in the grass, one of Gabba’s most famous nights. (Getty Images: Chris Hyde)
That element should be at the forefront of Victoria Park’s thought as, despite all Gabba’s failures, rituals had previously and after the match around their bars, clubs and neighboring pubs, say goodbye to a pork knuckle of the German club will be difficult unless a dignified alternative is forged.
It is likely that all that arrives on time and, as the new land emerges slowly from Park’s land, bringing with him the promise of a new era for sport in the city, Gabba weaknesses can still enter a more acute approach.
But so will the last lot of memories that Gabba provides us, since it stands out in his seven -year -old swan song. There is something of the legendary spirit of Queensland within those concrete pillars and marine and green seats, an uncompromising authenticity that will be lost when the new bright thing appears.
It is a movement that the city has to do as part of its growth process, but fortunately, there is still time for the gabba legend to develop a little more, so that these memories are lost in the rubble when the demolition ball swings.
