If These Walls Could Talk – A Celebration of the SCG

The Sydney Cricket Ground is one of world sport’s most iconic venues, and in If These Walls Could Talk – A Celebration of the Sydney Cricket Ground, Andrew Webster takes an in-depth look at some of the ground’s most dramatic and emotional moments.

Sir Donald Bradman is one of the stars of If These Walls Could Talk. In chapter 1, Andrew Webster recalls a recent lunch with two cricket legends, the late Alan Davidson and Neil Harvey, in the home dressing room in the sacred SCG Members Pavilion, and inevitably The Don becomes a subject of conversation. What did Davidson and Harvey really think of him? In chapter 4, which remembers the angry days of World Series Cricket, Webster reveals —quoting from previously unreleased private correspondence between Bradman and his great teammate Arthur Morris — just how much the nation’s best ever cricketer secretly loathed Kerry Packer’s cricket revolution. In chapter 9, Webster describes Steve Waugh’s fairytale hundred in the fifth Ashes Test of 2002–03, when Waugh equalled Bradman’s Australian record for most Test centuries.

Throughout the book, Webster goes to the source to find out what actually happened. He interviews Ray Baartz, one of Australia’s finest footballers, whose career was cut down by a Uruguayan opponent at the SCG in 1974. For years, the wrong man was blamed for that crime, but Andrew, with Ray’s help, finally sets the record straight. The chapter celebrating the ‘Gladiators’ and the epic St George-Wests rugby league grand finals of the early 1960s is poignant given the recent passing of Norm Provan, a league Immortal.

The memorable SCG events that are the basis for the book are all personal Webster favourites. There are Ashes Tests, Bledisloe Cup triumphs, State of Origin glory and landmark days and nights for Tony Lockett and the Sydney Swans. A man who usually plays on a very different stage is Peter Garrett, but the Midnight Oil front man’s links to the SCG extend from the 19th century, when his great grandfather Tom Garrett was a fine cricketer for NSW and Australia, to the Wave Aid concert staged on the hallowed turf in 2005.

The final chapter recalls the death of Phillip Hughes. ‘All but the bravest authors would avoid finishing with one of the most tragic and saddening moments in our ground’s history,’ writes SCG Chairman Tony Shepherd in his foreword. ‘Andrew did not take that easy, comfortable option.’ The words of David Warner and Michael Clarke, who Webster interviewed for the book, as they remember their late friend and all he meant to them and their sport, are sensitive, telling and important.