Optus Stadium Perth: The Complete Guide to Perth Stadium

Perth spent forty-seven years playing Test cricket on a ground that everybody loved and almost nobody could get into. The WACA held about twenty thousand with temporary seating, sat on a tight block in East Perth with no room to grow, and produced a pitch so quick that touring batters used to talk about the Perth Test the way climbers talk about weather windows. When Western Australia decided to build a new stadium, the question was never whether the WACA was a good cricket ground. It was whether a city of two million could keep hosting international sport in a venue that turned away more people than it admitted.

What went up on the Burswood peninsula instead is the newest major stadium in Australia and, by a reasonable margin, the best-designed one. It opened in January 2018, cost around 1.6 billion dollars including the transport works, holds 61,266, and is wrapped in a bronze aluminium screen that can be lit any colour from inside. It has its own six-platform railway station. It has a pedestrian bridge across the Swan. It also inherited something less tangible from the ground it replaced: the expectation that a Perth pitch will be the fastest in the country, and that a Test match here will not last five days.

That inheritance has held up better than most people expected. This guide covers how the ground came to be on that site, what the building actually does well, how the drop-in pitch has behaved since 2018, what the Test record says, where to sit, how to get there, and why a Perth Test is a scheduling headache for everyone living east of the Nullarbor.

Why Perth needed a new stadium

The case was made on three grounds, and only one of them was about cricket.

The first was capacity. Perth had no venue that could hold a modern crowd for either of its main sports. Subiaco Oval, the home of West Coast and Fremantle, topped out around 43,000 and was ageing badly. The WACA held roughly half of that. When an Ashes summer came around, or when both AFL clubs made a final, the city was simply short of seats, and the shortfall was measured in tens of thousands of people watching on television in the same suburb as the ground.

The second was that Perth was losing events. Rugby union Tests, football internationals, the larger concerts and the occasional relocated AFL final were all going elsewhere because Western Australia could not offer the seating or the corporate facilities to compete. For a state government running a resources-boom budget in the early 2010s, that was a solvable problem.

The third was that both existing venues were in the wrong place for the crowds they were trying to move. Subiaco funnelled 40,000 people through a suburban shopping strip. The WACA emptied into residential East Perth. Neither had a dedicated station.

Rebuilding the WACA was studied and rejected. The block is too small, the surrounding streets are too narrow, and any rebuild large enough to matter would have swallowed the ground's character while still leaving it hard to reach. The Western Australian Cricket Association eventually accepted a redevelopment of its own ground as a boutique venue and a training base, funded partly out of the new stadium arrangement, rather than trying to compete with it.

Choosing Burswood

The site is a peninsula in a bend of the Swan River, about three kilometres east of the Perth CBD, on land that had been a rubbish tip, then a golf course, then part of the Burswood entertainment complex. It was large, publicly owned, largely vacant and had river frontage on three sides.

The decision was contested. A CBD site at the Perth Waterfront and a northern site at Kitchener Park were both pushed hard, the argument being that a stadium in the middle of the city generates more economic activity around it than one on an isolated peninsula. Burswood won because of land availability and because the transport case could be built from scratch rather than retrofitted.

That last point turns out to be the single best thing about the venue. Because the site was empty, the station, the bus interchange, the bridge and the parkland were designed together with the stadium rather than bolted on afterwards. Almost no other Australian stadium can say that, and it shows in the ninety minutes after a full house when Perth empties faster than Melbourne or Sydney manage with far more established networks.

The building, and the bronze skin

The stadium is a three-tier bowl designed by a consortium of Hassell, HKS and Cox. The seating is unusually steep for an Australian oval venue, which brings the top tier closer to the play than the equivalent seats at the MCG, and the roof covers about 85 per cent of permanent seats. It does not close. Perth does not need it to.

The exterior is the part people photograph. It is clad in an anodised aluminium facade in bronze and copper tones chosen to reference the ochres of Western Australian rock, and it is backlit by a programmable LED system that can turn the entire building a single colour, or run patterns around it. On a West Coast night it goes blue and gold; on a Fremantle night it goes purple; for a Test it goes green and gold; for commemorative nights it goes whatever the occasion asks. From the Perth foreshore across the river it reads as a lit ring rather than a stadium, which is a rare thing for a building this size to achieve.

Inside, the notable innovation was the field club — hospitality spaces at ground level directly beside the boundary, with sightlines from the same height as the players. Perth was the first Australian stadium to build them. Two large video screens sit at either end and are, by Australian standards, genuinely large.

The surrounding parkland, Stadium Park, runs down to the river and includes an Aboriginal cultural trail with interpretive markers referencing the Whadjuk Noongar history of the peninsula, plus a large playground and barbecue areas that get used on non-event days by people who have no interest in sport at all.

Getting there, and the Matagarup Bridge

This is the venue's strongest practical feature. Three-quarters of the crowd arrives without a car.

By train. Perth Stadium station sits on the northern side of the ground with six platforms, purpose-built to clear a full house. Several Transperth lines run event services, and in recent seasons the event ticket has included free travel on Transperth trains, buses and ferries on match day — check the current terms, because that entitlement is a policy decision rather than a permanent feature. The walk from platform to gate is a couple of minutes.

On foot across the Matagarup Bridge. The bridge opened in mid-2018 and spans the Swan from East Perth, its two arches deliberately shaped to echo a pair of swans. From the East Perth side the walk takes ten to fifteen minutes and delivers you to the northern gates. It is the best approach to the ground, particularly at dusk before a night match, and on a warm evening it is worth the extra distance even if the train would be quicker.

By bus. The dedicated bus station has 22 stands and runs services to most parts of the metropolitan area.

By ferry. Transperth runs event ferries from Elizabeth Quay to the Burswood Jetty, a 96-metre landing on the western side of the peninsula. It is slower than the train and considerably more pleasant.

By car. Don't. Parking on site is minimal and pre-booked, the surrounding streets are restricted on event days, and the peninsula has limited road access by design. Park-and-ride at an outer station is the sensible compromise if you must drive part of the way.

The drop-in pitch

Perth uses drop-in pitches, grown in trays at a nursery and craned into the square, for the same reason Melbourne does — the ground has to convert between an AFL winter and a cricket summer, and a permanently prepared square cannot survive both.

The curator team took soil from the same profile used at the WACA and worked to reproduce the essential characteristic: pace off the surface with steep, consistent bounce. That has largely worked. Perth Stadium is comfortably the quickest pitch in Australia, quicker than the Gabba, and it rewards genuine fast bowling more than any other Test venue in the country. Bowlers hit the deck and the ball comes at the batter from a height that touring players who learn the game on slower surfaces find genuinely difficult.

Where it differs from the old ground is in how it ages. The WACA square, baked in situ over decades, used to crack open in wide fissures by day four and produce the most unpredictable bounce in world cricket. A drop-in tray does not crack the same way. Perth Stadium pitches deteriorate, but they deteriorate more evenly, and the demon fifth day the WACA was famous for has not really been reproduced.

The honest reading of the surface is this: the first two days are the hardest work a Test batter faces in Australia. If you survive them, the middle of the match is more comfortable than the reputation suggests.

What the Test record actually shows

Australia have played a small number of Tests here since 2018 and have won all but one of them, usually by very large margins and usually well inside the distance.

• December 2018 v India — Australia won by 146 runs in the ground's first Test.
• December 2019 v New Zealand — Australia won by 296 runs, the venue's first day-night Test.
• December 2022 v West Indies — Australia won by 164 runs, with a first-innings total of 598 for 4 declared, still the highest team score at the ground.
• December 2023 v Pakistan — Australia won by 360 runs.
• November 2024 v India — India won by 295 runs, the only home defeat.
• November 2025 v England — Australia won by eight wickets inside two days.

The pattern is not subtle. Perth produces results, it produces them fast, and it produces lopsided ones. Only one of those matches went into a fifth day. Anyone booking travel around a Perth Test should assume days four and five are a coin toss at best, and should buy the first three days if they are buying anything.

The 2024 India Test, and what it broke

India arrived in November 2024 without Rohit Sharma, were put in, and were bowled out for 150 on the opening day. That looked like the usual Perth script. It was not. India then dismissed Australia for 104 — the home side's second-lowest total at the ground — batted a second time to a position of complete control behind a Yashasvi Jaiswal century, and won by 295 runs.

The result mattered beyond the series because it ended an assumption. Perth had been treated as an automatic Australian advantage in the way the Gabba was for three decades: a fortress where a touring side's plans came apart on the first morning. One overseas attack, well prepared and led by a bowler who could exploit the same conditions the home side relied on, demonstrated that the advantage was conditional rather than structural.

The two-day Ashes Test of 2025

Twelve months later the ground produced the strangest Test match played in Australia in a century. On the opening day of the 2025-26 Ashes, in November 2025, nineteen wickets fell. England were dismissed for a low first-innings total, Australia did not do much better, and the match accelerated from there.

Mitchell Starc took ten wickets across the two days. Chasing 205 in the fourth innings, Australia lost Usman Khawaja to injury before the chase and promoted Travis Head to open. He made 123 from 83 balls, the second-fastest century in Ashes history, and Australia won by eight wickets at more than seven runs an over. It was the first Ashes Test to finish inside two days since 1921.

The match is worth understanding as a warning as much as a highlight. Every person who had bought a five-day pass saw two days of cricket. That is a Perth-specific risk, and it is real. The full series-by-series record is in the Ashes archive.

The Perth Scorchers, and the Furnace

The Big Bash tenancy is where the stadium is at its loudest. The Perth Scorchers moved across from the WACA and have become the competition's most successful club, and their home crowds are the largest in the tournament by a wide margin — routinely in the high twenties and thirties of thousands for an ordinary home fixture, with a Big Bash final crowd of 55,018 at the ground standing as the record for a final in the competition.

The reasons are partly cultural and partly geographic. Perth has one professional cricket team rather than two, so the market is not split the way Melbourne's and Sydney's are. The club has been consistently good for a decade and a half. And a summer evening in Perth is close to ideal for outdoor sport, with the sea breeze arriving in the late afternoon and the temperature dropping into something comfortable by the first innings break.

For a visitor, a Scorchers night is the easiest and cheapest way into the building. Tickets are usually available closer to the date than an AFL fixture, children's pricing is heavily discounted, and the noise inside a steep bowl with 40,000 people in it is a better argument for the stadium's design than any architectural description. The competition's structure and finals system are set out in the Big Bash format explainer.

Two AFL clubs, one stadium

Both Western Australian clubs are tenants: the West Coast Eagles and the Fremantle Football Club. They moved together from Subiaco Oval in 2018 and they share the ground the way the Melbourne clubs share the MCG and Marvel Stadium, which is to say that the building is neutral and both sets of supporters treat it as home.

The Western Derby between them fills the place and is one of the better atmospheres in Australian sport, largely because a single-team city would produce a one-sided crowd and Perth instead produces a split one.

The stadium also staged the 2021 AFL Grand Final, relocated from Melbourne because of pandemic restrictions, in front of 61,118 — the first Grand Final played outside Victoria in the modern era, and a night the state treated as vindication of the whole project.

For football the ground runs in oval configuration at roughly 165 metres by 130. For rugby and soccer it converts to a rectangle with temporary seating brought forward, lifting capacity closer to 65,000. A rugby Test between the Wallabies and the All Blacks in October 2025 drew the ground's record sporting attendance of 61,266.

The time-zone problem

Perth runs on Australian Western Standard Time and does not observe daylight saving. During an Australian summer that puts it two hours behind Brisbane and three hours behind Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide is closer, and Hobart.

The consequences for a Test match are immediate. A Perth Test that starts at 10.20am local time begins at 1.20pm on the east coast, where the overwhelming majority of the audience lives. Lunch falls in the middle of an eastern afternoon. The last session runs from roughly 6.30pm to 8.30pm eastern time, straight through the evening. Stumps is after 8pm in Sydney.

Broadcasters are split on whether this is good or bad. Prime-time evening cricket delivers a larger television audience than a session that ends at 5.30pm; against that, a working day in the east now overlaps two full sessions rather than one, and the traditional habit of having a Test on in the background from morning to evening does not survive the shift.

For a spectator planning a trip, the practical points are simpler. Play starts later in the day than at other Australian grounds relative to your body clock if you have flown from the east, the evening session is comfortable rather than baking, and a day-night Test in Perth pushes the finish close to midnight for anyone watching from Melbourne or Sydney. Broadcast and streaming arrangements for each format are covered in the guide to watching cricket in Australia.

Where to sit for cricket

The bowl is steep and there is no genuinely bad seat, which is not something you can say about most large stadiums. The trade-offs are about sun and angle rather than distance.

• Level 1, western side, square of the wicket. The best cricket seat in the ground. Close to the surface, the truest read of pace and carry, and shaded through the worst of the afternoon.
• Level 2, behind the bowler's arm. The television angle. Best for reading line, swing and a bowler's plan across an over. Worst for judging how far a shot has actually gone.
• Level 1, eastern side. Same quality of view as the west, considerably more sun. Fine for a night Big Bash game, punishing for a day Test in December.
• Level 3 anywhere. Steeper and closer than the equivalent seats in Melbourne, and the cheapest reserved tickets in the building. Genuinely usable, which is unusual for a third tier.

For AFL, invert it as you would anywhere: the wings, level with the centre square, on Levels 1 or 2.

Tickets, and the traps

Cricket tickets are sold through Cricket Australia's ticketing partner and AFL tickets through the league's, with members' and pre-sale windows first in both cases.

Three things worth knowing:

• Buy the first three days of a Test. The venue's record for producing early finishes is strong enough that days four and five carry real risk. If you can only attend one day, day one gives you the fullest house and the liveliest pitch.
• Ashes and India Tests are the only cricket that sells out. Everything else — West Indies, Pakistan, New Zealand, one-day internationals, most Scorchers home fixtures — is generally available in the weeks before.
• The free public transport entitlement is not automatic. It has applied to most recent events, but the terms change and it does not always extend to every service. Confirm on the ticket itself.

Resale should go through the official exchange. Third-party listings for Western Derbies and Ashes days are routinely cancelled at the gate.

Weather, and the Fremantle Doctor

Perth in summer is hot and dry. Days over 35 degrees are ordinary in December and January and days over 40 are not rare. The stadium's roof covers about 85 per cent of permanent seats, so shade is more available than at most Australian ovals, but the eastern side of the bowl takes the afternoon sun and you will feel it.

The mitigating factor is the Fremantle Doctor, the afternoon sea breeze that comes in off the Indian Ocean, usually somewhere between midday and mid-afternoon, and drops the temperature noticeably. It has been part of Perth cricket folklore for as long as the game has been played in the city, mainly because bowlers running in with it at their backs get several extra kilometres an hour for free. Watch which end the quicks want after the breeze arrives — it tells you more about the state of a session than the scoreboard does.

Practical advice: hat, sunscreen, refillable bottle. Sealed water is generally permitted and there are refill points on the concourses.

Accessibility

Accessible seating is distributed across all three tiers rather than concentrated at one level, with companion seating, lifts to every concourse, accessible toilets throughout and a Companion Card scheme. Accessible tickets are booked through the ticketing agent rather than at the gate.

Perth Stadium station, the bus interchange and the Matagarup Bridge are all step-free. The bridge has a lift on the East Perth side. Drop-off zones for accessible transport are on the northern approach and need to be pre-arranged for major events. A Changing Places facility is available at the venue, and the ground runs sensory kits and a quiet space for spectators who need them — availability varies by event, so ask ahead.

Food, drink and the concourses

The concourses are wide and the queues move faster than at older Australian grounds, largely because the venue was designed after the point at which stadium operators started taking food service seriously. There is a bias towards Western Australian suppliers, a decent range of local beer and wine, and the usual stadium pricing.

Two practical notes. The busiest outlets are on the western concourse behind the members' side; walking a quarter of the way around the ring will usually halve your wait. And the concourse ring is continuous, so you can circumnavigate the ground inside the building without going back through a gate — useful when the sun moves and you want a different view for an hour.

A short chronology

• 1970 — The WACA Ground stages its first Test match.
• 2011 — The Western Australian government confirms the Burswood site for a new stadium.
• 2014 — Construction begins on the peninsula.
• December 2017 — Soft opening; the WACA hosts its last men's Test, an Ashes match.
• 21 January 2018 — Official opening; the naming-rights deal with Optus is already in place.
• 2018 — West Coast, Fremantle and the Perth Scorchers all move in.
• June 2018 — The Matagarup Bridge opens across the Swan.
• December 2018 — First Test at the ground, Australia beat India by 146 runs.
• December 2019 — First day-night Test at the venue, against New Zealand.
• 2021 — The relocated AFL Grand Final is played there in front of 61,118.
• November 2024 — India win by 295 runs, the ground's first home defeat in a Test.
• November 2025 — Australia beat England inside two days in the Ashes opener.

How it compares with Australia's other Test grounds

Each of the main Australian venues does something the others do not, and Perth's contribution is speed.

• Perth Stadium is the quickest surface in the country and the newest building. Steep bowl, excellent transport, results-oriented pitch, awkward time zone.
• The MCG is the largest and the slowest, with the biggest crowds in world cricket and the Boxing Day Test. Full guide at Melbourne Cricket Ground.
• The SCG is the smallest of the five and the only one that reliably turns, which shapes Australia's selection for the New Year Test. See Sydney Cricket Ground.
• Adelaide Oval holds the pink-ball day-night Test and does more with twilight movement than any other ground in the country.
• The Gabba has the steepest bounce of the traditional grounds and was, until recently, the hardest place in the world for a touring side to start.

Dimensions, records and full comparisons for all of them are in the Australian cricket grounds guide.

What happened to the WACA

The old ground is still there and still in use. It hosts Sheffield Shield cricket, women's internationals, second-tier fixtures and grade finals, and it went through its own redevelopment as a smaller community and high-performance venue rather than being sold off. The Lillee-Marsh Stand still stands.

It is worth visiting if you are in Perth outside the international season, both because the atmosphere at a Sheffield Shield day is the closest thing left to Australian cricket as it was played before the crowds arrived, and because the scale contrast explains the new stadium better than any argument. Standing on the WACA boundary, you understand immediately why 61,000 people could not be accommodated there and why the state built somewhere else.

The case for going

Perth Stadium is the best-designed large stadium in Australia. The sightlines are better than the MCG's, the transport works better than any other Australian venue's, the roof covers more seats than any comparable ground, and the pitch produces the most watchable fast bowling in the country. What it does not have is history. There is no Long Room, no century of ghosts, no Boxing Day.

For a cricket traveller, the calculation is straightforward. A Test here will probably be over quickly and will probably feature the fastest bowling you see all summer. A Scorchers night in January is the cheapest, loudest and most reliably good evening of cricket available anywhere in Australia. And the walk across the Matagarup Bridge at dusk, with the building lit up in whatever colour the night calls for, is worth the trip on its own.

Records for every Australian who has played at the ground are in the player archive, and the rest of the country's venues are set out on the Australia sports hub.