Australian pace spearhead Mitchell Starc said that the players would have liked the 2025-26 Ashes series to begin in Brisbane over Perth. The 35-year-old also said that he missed playing at the old WACA ground, where bowlers got help from the Fremantle Doctor breeze blowing across the ground.
“We’ll find out in a week, won’t we? They don’t listen to the players; we would have liked to start in Brisbane, too. I miss the WACA. The Fremantle Doctor (the cooling afternoon breeze) comes in. It’s swirly wind here, not one direction. You can have three directions each over.”
“We’ve had five different wickets here in a sense – we’ve had a pretty slow, flat wicket against the West Indies, we had the first Test here where it cracked up and played a bit like the Waca used to. Last year, we saw lots of wickets on the first day. There’s been a fair bit made about the colour of it, that it’s going to be a green mamba – it’s all good and well to look at the wicket, but until both teams have played on it, we’re not really sure what it’s going to do,” Starc said ahead of the first Test.
Perth Stadium curator Isaac McDonald said that the venue hosting the first Test match in a series had become the norm in the last few years.
“We’ve actually opened the last four summers here. So we’ve been the first Test of the summer for the last four years. You get all the first-game hype regardless who it is – I thought last year with the Indian touring team that it was crazy, but this is a whole new level, being in the Ashes.”
“In some ways, it’s pretty cool that we are the first because it does have that extra little hype, but being a direct flight from the UK to Perth, it kind of makes sense that it is the first one. Just being around town, you can tell there’s a lot of travellers here that have come from the UK to watch this game, so it’s going to be really cool to kick it off,” he said.
This will be the first Ashes series since 1982-83 when the series opener will not take place at Brisbane. The Gabba will host the second Test match, which will be a Day-Night affair, from December 4-8.
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