Cricket in South Australia: Adelaide and the Redbacks

In 1934 the best batter in the world moved to Adelaide. Don Bradman had grown up in New South Wales and made his name for it, but a business offer, a state association keen to have him and a wife who liked the city combined to make him a South Australian. His first three innings for the state produced 117, 233 and 357. He captained it, retired to a house in Kensington Park, and spent decades afterwards as an administrator in the same city — first for the South Australian Cricket Association, later on the national board.

That single relocation tells you most of what is distinctive about cricket in South Australia. It is a small state, in playing-population terms the smallest of the three original Shield members, and its history has been built on attracting and then keeping people: Bradman from Sydney, Clarrie Grimmett from New Zealand by way of Melbourne, Greg Chappell going the other way when he left for Brisbane. The state punches above its weight when it holds on to its cricketers and struggles badly when it does not.

For twenty-nine seasons, from the mid-1990s onwards, it mostly did not. Then in two consecutive Marches it won the Sheffield Shield twice.

Adelaide Oval, and what the rebuild kept

Adelaide Oval hosted its first Test in December 1884 and has staged one in most Australian summers since. It seats a little over 53,000 after the redevelopment carried out between roughly 2012 and 2014, which brought Australian rules football back from the city's other stadium and turned the ground into a year-round venue.

The rebuild is worth dwelling on because it is the rare case of a heritage ground being enlarged without being ruined. The scoreboard from 1911 — manually operated, heritage-listed, sitting on the northern side beneath the hill — was kept, and now works alongside a digital screen. The Moreton Bay figs planted in the 1890s were kept. The sightline south towards the spires of St Peter's Cathedral was kept. What changed was three new stands and the crowd capacity that comes with them.

One thing did change on the field: since 2013 the ground has used drop-in pitches, grown away from the square and lowered in. Adelaide had a long-standing reputation as the flattest and most batting-friendly surface in the country, a ground where a Test drifted towards a draw unless somebody did something extraordinary on the last afternoon. The drop-in era has produced more result-oriented cricket than that, and how the ground compares with the rest is set out in the guide to Australian cricket grounds.

The first Test played under lights

On 27 November 2015 Australia and New Zealand walked out at Adelaide Oval to begin the first day-night Test in the game's history. It lasted three days, it produced a low-scoring, tense match, and it drew crowds across the three days that a mid-November Test against New Zealand would never have drawn in daylight.

Adelaide has hosted a day-night Test in most summers since, and the fixture has become the ground's signature rather than a novelty. There are reasons the experiment was tried here first. The evening weather in late November is dependable, the ground had just been rebuilt with proper floodlighting, and the association was willing. The full account of that fixture is in the guide to the Adelaide day-night Test, and what the ball itself does under lights is explained in pink-ball cricket.

Adelaide has also been the ground where Ashes series turn ugly. The third Test of the 1932-33 series, played here in January 1933, is the match at which the Bodyline tour stopped being a cricket argument and became a diplomatic one. That series is covered in Ashes series in Australia.

Grimmett, and the spin inheritance

South Australia's bowling history is a leg-spinner's history. Clarrie Grimmett, born in Dunedin, played for Victoria without much encouragement and then moved to Adelaide, where he took more first-class wickets for the state than anyone before or since — a total past six hundred and sixty. He was small, undemonstrative, bowled flat and fast for a wrist-spinner and got most of his wickets with a ball that skidded on rather than one that ballooned.

Ashley Mallett continued the line as an off-spinner in the 1970s. The state's genuine pace tradition arrived later and mostly through one bowler: Jason Gillespie, who came out of Adelaide club cricket to open the bowling for Australia for the better part of a decade, and who has since coached and worked in the county game. The wider Australian relationship with wrist spin, which South Australia contributed disproportionately to, is clearest in Shane Warne's player record.

Keeping wicket, and batting hard

Behind the stumps the state has been unusually well served. Barry Jarman kept for Australia in the 1960s and later became a Test match referee. Alex Carey came through the Adelaide system, took the Australian gloves and has since made hundreds in Ashes Tests and Shield finals alike. The particular craft involved is described in the guide to the art of wicketkeeping.

The batting tradition is louder. Les Favell captained with a permanently attacking policy that made no allowance for match situation. Ian and Greg Chappell both came out of Adelaide, and Ian's captaincy of Australia in the 1970s was formed in the state side. David Hookes hit five consecutive boundaries off Tony Greig at the Centenary Test in Melbourne, spent his career being simultaneously admired and criticised for the same shots, and later coached both South Australia and Victoria. Darren Lehmann scored heavily enough for the state across the 1990s to be a domestic institution long before he coached Australia.

The modern equivalent is Travis Head, an Adelaide product who bats with the same disregard for the state of the match that Favell would have recognised, and who has spent recent seasons making match-defining hundreds at pace in Test cricket.

There is a genuine dynasty inside all this. Vic Richardson captained South Australia and then captained Australia on tour in the mid-1930s; his grandsons Ian, Greg and Trevor Chappell all played for the state and for Australia, and two of them captained the country. Australian cricket has no other family line of that depth, and it belongs to the smallest of the three founding states.

Twenty-nine years, and then two in a row

South Australia won the Shield in 1995-96 and then did not win it again for twenty-nine seasons. That is a long time for a founding member. The reasons were the familiar ones for a small state — losing established players to bigger markets, thin depth when three or four cricketers were injured or on national duty — compounded by long stretches of finishing at or near the bottom of the table.

The drought broke at Adelaide Oval in March 2025. South Australia had to chase a large fourth-innings target in the final against Queensland, lost early wickets, and were rescued by a stand of over two hundred between Jason Sangha, who finished unbeaten past a hundred and twenty, and Alex Carey, who made a hundred. Brendan Doggett took eleven wickets across the match, the best figures recorded in a Shield final. The side was captained by Nathan McSweeney in his first season in the job and coached by Ryan Harris. The same season South Australia also won the domestic one-day competition, completing a double the state had never previously managed; that competition's format is set out in the guide to the One-Day Cup.

What made the win credible rather than fortunate was that most of the side had come through the state's own system. McSweeney, Sangha and the seam attack were all products of Adelaide grade cricket or of moves made young enough to count as local, and Carey had been in the set-up for a decade. South Australia's problem in the barren years was rarely a shortage of one good player; it was having three at a time and no fourth.

The defence, a year later, was stranger. South Australia went to Melbourne for the 2025-26 final, were put in and dismissed for under two hundred, and looked beaten. Alex Carey made another hundred in the second innings, adding a century stand with Nathan McAndrew from a hopeless position, and then the bowlers took the match apart: Victoria lost their last seven wickets for well under fifty and South Australia won by 56 runs. McAndrew took the match award. Liam Scott, who had made over five hundred runs and taken close to thirty wickets across the season, took the player-of-the-tournament award. Back-to-back Shields were a first in the state's history.

Grade cricket in Adelaide

The state competition is the South Australian Grade Cricket League, and its clubs are organised on the old suburban and district lines. Kensington, nicknamed the Browns, was the club Bradman and Grimmett both played for, and Kensington Oval remains one of the better small grounds in the country. Sturt has more A-grade premierships than any other club. Glenelg, founded in 1907 and known as the Seahorses, plays on the coast. Port Adelaide, East Torrens, West Torrens, Prospect, Woodville, Northern Districts, Southern Districts, Tea Tree Gully and Adelaide University fill out the competition.

The route from grade cricket to a state contract is direct and short here, more so than in Sydney or Melbourne, because the pool is smaller. A good season in Adelaide grade cricket is noticed. How this tier works nationally is described in the guide to grade cricket.

Karen Rolton Oval, on the western parklands and named for one of the finest batters Australian women's cricket has produced, is the state's second professional venue at around five thousand capacity. It hosts women's internationals, domestic fifty-over and Twenty20 cricket and some men's second-tier fixtures.

It also solves a scheduling problem the redevelopment created. Adelaide Oval now belongs to two football clubs for half the year, which means Shield and one-day matches cannot always be fitted around the main square. Having a second turf venue ten minutes from the city has made it possible to run a full domestic programme without the state side becoming a permanent away team.

Outside Adelaide, cricket runs through country associations in the Barossa, the Riverland, the Yorke and Eyre peninsulas and the state's south-east. The distances are considerable and the pathway to grade cricket usually involves a move to the city in the late teens, which is a familiar story for anyone who has followed how rural Australian cricketers reach the professional game.

The Strikers, men's and women's

The Adelaide Strikers won the Big Bash in 2017-18, their only men's title, playing home matches at Adelaide Oval in front of some of the largest crowds in the competition. The women's team has been the more successful of the two, winning consecutive WBBL titles in 2022-23 and 2023-24, the second of those as minor premiers, with Karen Rolton Oval as their home base. The competition they won is covered in the guide to the Women's Big Bash League.

Following the game here

Shield cricket in Adelaide is played at Adelaide Oval when the football calendar allows and at Karen Rolton Oval otherwise, and both are free or nearly free to attend. The day-night Test is the hardest ticket in the state and the evening sessions sell first. Strikers matches at Adelaide Oval fill the lower tiers rather than the whole ground for most fixtures.

Club cricket entry runs through any SACA-affiliated club, and the junior formats move onto turf in the mid-teens at most metropolitan grounds. For the neighbouring state whose final South Australia won in 2026, see cricket in Victoria; how the Shield itself is scored and decided is in the Sheffield Shield explained; and the rest of the country is covered from the cricket in Australia hub.

Sources and method

This page rests on South Australian Cricket Association material on its teams, grounds and grade competition, Adelaide Oval's published record of Tests and its redevelopment, and match reports and scorecards for the 2024-25 and 2025-26 Sheffield Shield finals. Career totals for Grimmett and other historical figures are taken from long-standing first-class records and are given in rounded form. Title counts are described by era rather than as running totals. Nothing on this page is derived from our own computed datasets.