Peter Kettle |
With the caveat that our personal impressions may be fallible, here are mine based on conservative Matt Page being interviewed by a group of journalists the day after the Melbourne Test debacle – which, as everyone now knows, lasted no more than two days, with dominant seam bowlers and 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 apparent that Matt Page is not a very educated person – due to his harsh accent and, more tellingly, his virtually endless repetition of phrases like “I’m very disappointed by this”, “That’s not what we were aiming for”, “I was shocked by the way the pitch performed” and others. It is now a formality for the ICC to declare this pitch “unsatisfactory”, after receiving a report from its match referee Jeff Crowe.
Being an expat from Pommie – coming to live in Melbourne four decades ago – I imagine that Matt Page’s counterpart at Lord’s (Karl McDermott who took over in 2018) may have been educated at an English state school (like Winchester, Stowe or Lancing College*), and he certainly speaks well in interviews.
Throughout these questions and answers, the optics were not helped by the fact that the introducer – Melbourne Cricket Club chief executive Stuart Fox – had a grim expression and looked like he was trying to spot someone in the press, or surrounding spectators, who might be carrying a gun as a prelude to an attempted subpoena.
Appointed in November 2017, after serving in the same role for several years looking after the WACA ground in Perth, Page said the ground had proven to go too far in favoring seam bowlers; also that the degree of rebound obtained surprised him. But he failed to directly answer a number of important questions – repeatedly saying that when all the data is available, we will take a close look at it and learn from it for the future, but without explicitly mentioning what kind of data he would have. I suppose this generally includes summary statistics on the amount of bounce and lateral movement off the court, whether or not the bounce is consistent, the relative speed of deliveries before and after hitting the court, the depth of deliveries to the keeper and perhaps other topics as well.
As for the 10 millimeters of turf allowed on the pitch, that contrasts with just 7 millimeters for the MCG Test against India in mid-December 2024 – the match lasted five days, with 81 overs delivered on the final day. Page said this pitch surface for the England game needed to make it last and not deteriorate significantly, against the backdrop of the expectation of “lots of hot weather at the back” of the planned five days of play – presumably meaning days four and five. Well, it seems he was very misinformed about the weather forecast. That given by the Victoria Bureau of Meteorology early Wednesday 24th In December (two days before the start of the match), the maximum temperatures were 21°C that day, followed by 17-19°C, 18-20 (for day 1), 22°C, 24°C, 29°C and 25°C (for day 5).
Melbourne residents think 30°C is hot and the mid-30s are also hot, and so no truly ‘hot’ weather has been predicted. Therefore, speaking like Page was absolutely absurd. And it turned out that the projections were, in general, true to reality when it happened: 17.5°C on day one, 19.7°C on day 2, 28.7°C on day 3, and 34.8°C on day 4 – the only really hot day – with 27°C expected tomorrow (day 5). Of course, it is the Met Office forecasts rather than the results that count for pitch preparation.
The cost of playing no more than the second day is estimated at around A$10 million by Cricket Australia, which faces a host of compensation for potential spectators, significantly compounding losses suffered early in the series in Perth.
*I am wrong about this: Karl McDermott began his career as a gardener at an early age after leaving school in Dublin, starting work at Clontarf Cricket Club in that city.
