High cost on the baggy green

Any former Test players considering selling their baggy greens to fund their retirement should get in quick.

Where Southeby's would normally handle such a rare piece of sporting memorabilia, there are so many cheap Australian caps flooding the market that their future sales could be more suited to eBay.

Three more hats will be handed out on Thursday morning. It used to be unusual for one to be presented per series.

There is no doubt Australian cricket is struggling and combined with an increase in Test commitments, the value of what was once the most prized piece of sporting equipment in this country has been devalued.

Receiving a baggy green was a reward within itself. It was the prize for years of work and patience waiting for an opportunity.

And once you had it, no-one could take it from you. Even if sold (Don Bradman's cap fetched $425,000 at a 2003 auction) it will forever remain the spiritual property of the first wearer.

Steve Waugh held off replacing his dilapidated baggy green because it contained the smell, the feel, the essence of his Test career.

Now there is hardly the trace of a bead of sweat in some Australian players' hats.

Life after AFL for good old Subi

Good old Subiaco Oval, she has served WA football so well.

But, in what is well known to every AFL fan still picking splinters from their backside after surviving substandard seating at the venue marketers now want us to call Patersons Stadium, there isn't much life left in the old girl.

On a whim Premier Colin Barnett deemed Perth's new super multi-purpose venue - the next home of AFL football in the State - would be built at Burswood. It is easier to have a collect from Lotto than determining when the first ball will be kicked in Col's Bowl.

Yet, it is more likely that sooner rather than later Subiaco Oval will be retired.

So what do you do with an old sports ground with room for 43,000 people?

There isn't a Sunday market that has a grandstand stall. And unlike overseas sports that frequently explode old stadiums as they move to bigger, more modern, digs, Australia doesn't have a lot of experience with recycling redundant sports grounds.

The major stadia in Australia's big cities have been around for more than a century - MCG, SCG, Adelaide Oval, Gabba, even our WACA Ground. They have undergone significant renovations but are mostly on the site they have occupied since the turf was first tossed to develop the venues.

The AFL's quickly-forgotten ground in Waverley is one example of a major coliseum put on the sporting scrapheap. Just 20 years ago VFL/AFL Park hosted a grand final. Today it features a new housing estate, although the playing ground and the main grandstand still exist as the training base for Hawthorn.

Neither the WA Football Commission nor the City of Subiaco has yet discussed what to do with the Subiaco Oval corpse once its lifeblood has disappeared.