JE Hands Memorial Park, more commonly known as Hands Oval, is a stadium in

South Bunbury, Western Australia South Bunbury is a beachside suburb in Bunbury, Western Australia. It is located in the local government area of the City of Bunbury. The area is also known as 'Mangles'. The South Bunbury Football Club's home ground is located at Hands Oval in ...

. The ground is mainly used for

football Football is a family of team sports that involve, to varying degrees, kicking a ball to score a goal. Unqualified, the word ''football'' normally means the form of football that is the most popular where the word is used. Sports commonly c ...

matches, but has also hosted

soccer Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a team sport played between two teams of 11 players who primarily use their feet to propel the ball around a rectangular field called a pitch. The objective of the game is ...

and

rugby union Rugby union, commonly known simply as rugby, is a close-contact team sport that originated at Rugby School in the first half of the 19th century. One of the two codes of rugby football, it is based on running with the ball in hand. In its m ...

games and for a short time cricket.

Uses

Australian rules football

The oval has been the home ground of

South Bunbury Football Club South Bunbury Football Club is a semi-professional Australian rules football club based in South Bunbury, Western Australia. The club plays in the South West Football League. Since being founded in 1897 the club has won 45 premierships and has be ...

and in the SWFL since the early 1950s. Hands Oval has also hosted five

West Australian Football League The West Australian Football League (WAFL) is an Australian rules football league based in Perth, Western Australia. The league currently consists of ten teams, which play each other in a 20-round season usually lasting from March to September, ...

matches, with the first being held on 1 April 1984 with

East Perth East or Orient is one of the four cardinal directions or points of the compass. It is the opposite direction from west and is the direction from which the Sunrise, Sun rises on the Earth. Etymology As in other languages, the word is formed from ...

defeating

Swan Districts The Swan Districts Football Club, nicknamed the Swans, is an Australian rules football club playing in the West Australian Football League (WAFL) and WAFL Women's (WAFLW). The club is based at Bassendean Oval, in Bassendean, an eastern suburb ...

by 14 points. The record attendance for the ground was set during this match, with 6573 spectators attending the game. The ground also hosted two

Fremantle Dockers The Fremantle Football Club, nicknamed the Dockers, is a professional Australian rules football club competing in the Australian Football League (AFL), the sport's elite competition. The team was founded in 1994 to represent the port city of Fr ...

pre-season

NAB Challenge In the Australian Football League (AFL), previously the Victorian Football League (VFL), the pre-season competition, known during its history by a variety of sponsored names and most recently as the NAB Cup, was an annual Australian rules foot ...

2009 File:2009 Events Collage V2.png, From top left, clockwise: The vertical stabilizer of Air France Flight 447 is pulled out from the Atlantic Ocean; Barack Obama becomes the first African American to become President of the United States; 2009 Iran ...

and

2011 File:2011 Events Collage.png, From top left, clockwise: a protester partaking in Occupy Wall Street heralds the beginning of the Occupy movement; protests against Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who was killed that October; a young man celebrate ...

Cricket

Hands Oval has hosted three

List A List A cricket is a classification of the limited-overs (one-day) form of the sport of cricket, with games lasting up to eight hours. List A cricket includes One Day International (ODI) matches and various domestic competitions in which the numbe ...

cricket matches with the

Western Warriors The Western Australian Men’s cricket team, formerly nicknamed the Western Warriors, represent the Australian state of Western Australia in Australian domestic cricket. The team is selected and supported by the Western Australian Cricket Asso ...

as the home team:

Soccer

Hands Oval hosted an

A-League A-League Men (known as the Isuzu UTE A-League for sponsorship reasons) is the highest-level professional men's soccer league in Australia and New Zealand. At the top of the Australian league system, it is the country's premier men's competiti ...

pre-season match between

Perth Glory Perth Glory Football Club is an Australian professional soccer club based in Perth, Western Australia. It competes in the country's premier men's competition, A-League Men, under licence from Australian Professional Leagues. Founded in 19 ...

and

Gold Coast United Gold Coast United Football Club is an Australian soccer club based in Gold Coast, Queensland. The earliest incarnation of the club formed in 1966 and its home ground was at Nikiforides Family Park in Broadbeach. The first era of Gold Coast Unit ...

at the beginning of the 2009–10 season, with Gold Coast defeating Perth 1–0.Glory go close in battle of Bunbury
- PerthGlory.com.au. A crowd of 2985 people attended the match:

References

{{WAFL West Australian Football League grounds Multi-purpose stadiums in Australia Sport in Bunbury, Western Australia Sports venues in Western Australia Cricket grounds in Australia Sports venues completed in 1954 1954 establishments in Australia