The Waca in Perth is a shrine to malevolence, but is not the only world sporting cathedral to inspire fascination and fear
Watching England's cricketers take to the field in the third Test at Perth, 1-0 up, I admit to feeling nauseous. Not that I'm worried about England's much-hyped hoodoo at the Waca, or Australia's revised bowling line-up. It's a visceral reaction to the scene of the lowest moment of my spectating life.
Four years ago, I'd arrived in Perth for my first ever overseas Ashes Test. The city was in the grip of a heatwave. Not the fun kind that we celebrate over here by cavorting in fountains, but the Australian kind that slowly sears your skin and ferments your brain. My ticket was for the uncovered section of the Inverarity Stand, where I sat all day in 40C temperatures. In the middle were England's batsmen, like flies to the wanton gods, and Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne, at the end of their careers, torturing them for kicks.
Five days in the infernal bowl of the Waca and I knew more of hell than Dante's copytaker; my family weren't due to arrive until the next drubbing at the MCG, so I was all alone with my misery. On the final lunchtime, when only Monty Panesar's batting stood between Australia and Ashes victory, I retreated to the park outside the ground, sat on the scrub under a lone, scorched tree, and wept hot tears. Fallacies don't come more pathetic.
Naturally, I now regard the Waca as a place of utter malevolence, the kind of fortress where Morgan le Fay would raise her witchy army, then hold a press conference to announce her latest attack on Camelot. Perhaps this is the way Rangers fans feel about Celtic Park; maybe Paula Radcliffe suffers the same electric surge of nausea when visiting the Acropolis. Perhaps not. But the sheer Kurtz-ian horror of the Waca was a new experience for me.
Growing up, the mythology of the stadium was the one part of fan lore I struggled to absorb. We're supposed to enter these "cathedrals of sport" with awe and reverence, like Moses approaching the burning bush, but you need only to pop in midweek to see that, without the matchday worshippers, they're fairly uniform concrete bowls, with a bit of coloured livery. The notion that these pseudo-fascistic hunks of modernism and metal strapping somehow contain the soul of the home team seemed pretty unlikely. Maybe it's because my generation grew up watching sport on telly. Maybe it's because the first place I went to a game was Kenilworth Road.
But for many sports fans, stadiums will always have the quality of shrines. Being of the Protestant tradition, the notion of pilgrimage was completely foreign to me, so the first time I went abroad with a boyfriend, and he bought tickets to a Barcelona game, I assumed it was to impress me, not so that he could see the inside of the Camp Nou. Then we went to New Zealand, and he ducked out of an afternoon's sightseeing in Wellington to visit the Basin Reserve (even though it was raining, and there was no game scheduled).
There was the Sunday morning in Sydney when I headed to church, and he made his own sacred journey to the Telstra Stadium to sit in the dressing?room stall that England's Jonny Wilkinson had occupied at the 2003 Rugby World Cup.
But my favourite was the time he returned from a trip to Dundee with a small gift and an air of thrilled satisfaction: he had been to Tannadice Street, unique in boasting two professional football grounds, and come back with a Dundee FC pencil case filled with Dundee United pencils.
Before you mock, be warned: it can happen to anyone. It turns out that stadium visiting is a highly contagious behavioural pattern and, before you know it, you're standing outside Eden Gardens in Calcutta, pulling sad eyes until a kindly steward agrees to let you in for a peek, and the most precious item in your jewellery box is a small pouch containing bits of turf from Barbados, Sri Lanka and Old Trafford.
Oh yes, my friends: until you've gone jogging to disguise a shame-inspiring early-morning visit to Pride Park, you just don't know how far this frightening addiction will take you.
A trip to Los Angeles last month revealed how hopelessly I had succumbed. American football means as much to me as monogamy means to Shane Warne, but that didn't stop me walking five miles to see the Rose Bowl in Pasadena and, once there, talking my way past its art deco facade and into its 1920s stands (in cases like these, an excitable English accent and air of baffled innocence is invaluable).
As I stood in the stands, talking to the manager of the ground about its 91,000 capacity, and its original horsehoe shape, I realised I had just forfeited the right to call anyone a loser ever again. I had also finally joined the cult of stadium worship ? its mysteries were now, irrevocably, mine.
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