WACA boss rejects stadium plan

The WACA Ground will remain cricket's preferred ground for international matches after the game's most senior WA official claimed yesterday a new 60,000-seat sports stadium offered the sport little value.

Responding officially for the first time to John Langoulant's major stadium task force, WACA chairman David Williams said the interim report had made factual errors and offered little to cricket.
  
Writing to the WACA's 7500 members a month after Mr Langoulant recommended cricket share a potential new stadium with football while downgrading its historic East Perth headquarters to a domestic venue, Mr Williams rejected the task force's findings. "There is little in the interim report recommendations for cricket as it stands," Mr Williams wrote to members.
  
"There seems little business sense in reducing the WACA Ground capacity to 10,000 for domestic games only. Without a firm idea of the financial case for playing international cricket at another stadium . . . it is hard to see how cricket will be better off."
  
Mr Williams said the WACA was not opposed to the development of a new stadium but argued it would be too big for most cricket crowds and would make the WACA Ground redundant. "A new stadium makes sense for football but it doesn't make sense for cricket," he said yesterday.
  
But Mr Langoulant mounted a vigorous defence of his interim report, saying any issues disputed by the WACA were matters of interpretation and that cricket would be shortsighted if it turned its back on a new facility.
  
The task force chairman inspected the Gabba and Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane yesterday after examining the MCG and Telstra Dome in Melbourne and Sydney's SCG and Telstra Stadium.
  
"Cricket are selling themselves short if they reject a new stadium," he said. "They should have a bigger, more strategic and more optimistic view of what is possible in a new stadium."