A Boxing Day Test to forget
Good for England. They have broken a 15-year drought and finally won a Test match in Australia.
It’s just a shame that this Ashes series is already dead. And a shame that what was in some ways the most competitive Test match of this tour was also the most unsatisfying. Into the last hour, the result could have gone either way. Usually that’s a good thing. But not when it means the last hour of day two.
For the second time in this series, fans have been subjected to a two-day Test. Two-day Tests are so rare that Cricinfo has a dedicated stats page that lists them individually. There have only been 27 of them in nearly 150 years of Test cricket. Between 1947 and 1999 there weren’t any.
And now, two in a series. It’s garbage cricket, and fans deserve better.
The pitch in Perth wasn’t bad – the ICC in fact rated it “very good” – but amid the hype of the first Test, England seemed to be wound tightly into a Bazball that bounced every which way, especially loose. Australia’s batters underperformed too, until Travis Head won the game with an innings for the ages. It was a disappointingly short match, but you could write it off as an anomaly.
But two Tests out of four? That’s not an anomaly. It’s a trend. Conditions were more challenging at the MCG, where the pitch was left with 10mm of grass at the start of play – even the Wimbledon tennis courts are only mown to 8mm. But it was as if both batting line-ups saw the pitch and the lateral movement, threw up their hands and said “this is too hard, we might as well not try”.
Twenty years ago, or probably even less, both Australia and England would have had in their line-ups far more players who would have said “this is hard, we’d better dig in”. And would have had the technical skills to do so - at least for longer than we saw here. The pitch is only part of the equation. The mindset is the other.
I covered the Australian team for more than a decade as a journalist with Cricinfo and I saw my share of challenging pitches. One that came to mind was Australia’s loss to New Zealand in a rain-affected match at Bellerive Oval in 2011. The ball was moving in the air and off the wicket and both teams struggled with the bat on a pitch so green it was like Kermit the Frog had got squished by the heavy roller.
But what struck me when I looked back at the scorecard was that the shortest innings of that match was 45.5 overs, when New Zealand were bowled out in the first innings for 150. The longest innings at the MCG this year was Australia’s 45.2 overs in the first innings. All four innings in that Hobart Test were longer than any innings here.
What also struck me was that the batter who showed the most resolve in that Hobart Test was David Warner, in just his second Test match. He carried his bat for 123 in that fourth innings, running out of partners as Australia fell just short in their chase of 241. And as I wrote at the time, when he went to stumps on day three on 47 not out, he had hit eight boundaries and none of them went in the air. David Warner may not be the poster-boy for careful cricket, but he showed there are ways to reduce risk while also scoring at a decent rate.
In Melbourne this year, it just felt like both teams were playing a Twenty20 match – and not particularly well. Here we are at the end of day two and the end of the game. This was junk food cricket, in one end and out the other in quick time, with little nutritional value and much regret. Meanwhile, there will be people who haven’t even fully digested their Christmas pudding yet.
This should have been a Test that made it comfortably into day three, and perhaps even nudged into day four. Still not the ideal length for a Test, maybe, but passable. Two days is a failure all around. It is also a financial disaster for Cricket Australia as roughly 90,000 tickets will have to be refunded for day three. Combined with the two-day Test in Perth, that’s like a mini recession for the sport.
Think about all those eyeballs that won’t be on cricket for the next couple of days. All those kids who were excitedly looking forward to their first day at a Test match, day three of the Boxing Day Test. The British comedian Alan Davies, of QI fame, posted on social media: “Maybe someone from Cricket Australia could explain to my ten year old why they can’t prepare a proper test match wicket. He’s been looking forward to his day at the MCG for months. Gutted.”
Australia lost badly but have already won the series. The fans were short-changed and so were Cricket Australia. England won the match and broke a drought, which is not nothing, but is also not a lot when they’ve already lost the Ashes. Perhaps the biggest winner from this Test was Josh Tongue, who won the Mullagh Medal as Player of the Match, claimed his best Test figures and secured his place in the England side.
It's just a shame that the Boxing Day Test, which should be one of the biggest spectacles in Australian sport, made such a spectacle of itself.