With the caveat that one’s personal impressions can be fallible, here are mine based on curator Matt Page’s interview by a gang of media people on the day following the debacle of the Melbourne Test – which as everybody now knows lasted no more than two days, with seam bowlers dominating and some technically poor batting from a number of members of both teams.
It wasn’t a good start to this Q & A session, as it became immediately obvious that Matt Page is not a highly educated person – by dint of his rough accent and, more tellingly, his virtually endless repetition of phrases such as, “I’m very disappointed by this”, “It’s not what we were aiming at”, “I was shocked at how the pitch behaved” and similar. It is now a formality for the ICC to declare this pitch “unsatisfactory”, on receiving a report from its match referee Jeff Crowe.
Being a Pommie expatriate – coming to live in Melbourne four decades ago – I envisage that Matt Page’s counterpart at Lord’s (Karl McDermott who took over in 2018) may have been educated at an English public school (such as Winchester or Stowe or Lancing College *), and he certainly speaks well in interview.
Throughout this questioning and responses, the optics were not helped by the introducer – Melbourne Cricket Club’s chief executive, Stuart Fox – having a grim expression and looking as though he was trying to spot anyone in the press, or surrounding spectators, who might be carrying a gun as a prelude to an assignation attempt.
Appointed in November 2017, having had the same role for a number of years looking after the WACA ground in Perth, Page did say that the pitch turned out to go too far in favouring the seam bowlers; also, that the degree of bounce obtained surprised him. But he failed to answer a number of important questions directly – repeatedly saying that when all the data is in, we will have a close look at it and learn from it for the future, yet not mentioning explicitly what sort of data would be at his disposal. I gather this usually includes summary stats on the degree of bounce and lateral movement off the pitch, consistency or otherwise of bounce, relative speed of deliveries before and after hitting the pitch, the depth of carry of deliveries through to the keeper and maybe some other topics as well.
As to the admitted 10 millimetres of grass covering on the pitch, this contrasts with only 7 millimetres for the MCG Test against India in mid-December 2024 – the game lasting for five days, with 81 overs delivered on the final day. Page said this pitch covering for the England match was to make it last and not significantly deteriorate, in the context of expecting “a lot of hot weather at the back end” of the scheduled five days of play – presumably meaning days four and five. Well, it seems that he was badly misinformed about the weather forecast. That given by Victoria’s Bureau of Meteorology early on Wednesday 24th December (two days prior the start of play) was for maximum temperatures of 21C that day, followed by 17-19C, 18-20 (for Day 1), 22C, 24C, 29C and 25C (for Day 5).
Melbourne-ites think of 30C as warm and the mid-30s as hot, and so no truly “hot” weather was forecast. Accordingly, it was arrant nonsense to talk as Page did. And it turned out that the projections were, in general, closely mirrored by reality when that came along: 17.5C on Day 1, 19.7C on Day 2, 28.7C on Day 3, and 34.8C on Day 4 – the only truly hot day – with 27C being expected tomorrow (Day 5). Though, of course, it is Met Office forecasts rather than the out-turn that count for pitch preparation.
The cost due to play not going beyond Day 2 is put at around A$10 million by Cricket Australia, which faces a multitude of compensatory payouts to would be spectators, thereby much aggravating the losses made at the start of the series in Perth.
* I’m wrong on this: Karl McDermott started his career as a groundsman as an early-teenager after leaving school in Dublin, beginning his work at the Clontarf Cricket Club in that city.
