Peter Ketel |
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 the day after the Melbourne Test debacle – which, as everyone now knows, lasted no more than two days, with bowlers dominating and technically poor batting from a number of members of both teams.
It was not a good start to this question and answer session, as it immediately became clear that Matt Page is not a highly educated person – from his rough accent and, more tellingly, his almost endless repetition of sentences like: “I’m very disappointed with this”, “This is not what we were aiming for”, “I was shocked at how the field behaved” and the like. It is now a formality for the ICC to declare this pitch “unsatisfactory” after receiving a report from match referee Jeff Crowe.
As an expat from Pommie – who came to live in Melbourne four decades ago – I imagine 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 interviews.
During these questions and answers, the optics were not helped by the fact that the introducer – Melbourne Cricket Club director Stuart Fox – had a grim expression and looked as if he was trying to spot someone in the press or surrounding spectators who might be carrying a gun as a prelude to an attribution attempt.
Page was appointed in November 2017 and had held the same role as manager of the WACA site in Perth for a number of years. Page did say that the pitch proved to be too far in favor of the bowlers; also that the degree of bounce obtained surprised him. But he failed to answer several important questions directly. He repeatedly said that once all the data is in, we will look at it closely and learn from it for the future, without explicitly saying what kind of data he would have. I understand that this usually includes summary statistics about the amount of bounce and lateral movement off the pitch, the consistency or otherwise of the bounce, the relative speed of the ball before and after hitting the pitch, the depth of the ball’s transfer to the goalkeeper and perhaps some other topics as well.
As for the permitted 10 millimeters of grass cover on the pitch, this contrasts with just 7 millimeters for the MCG Test against India in mid-December 2024 – the match which lasted five days, with 81 overs on the final day. Page said this pitch covering for the match against England was intended to last the match and not deteriorate significantly, in the context of expecting “plenty of warm weather at the end” of the scheduled five matchdays – likely the fourth and fifth days. It seems he was misinformed about the weather forecast. This was announced by Victoria’s Bureau of Meteorology on Wednesday 24 Wednesdaye In December (two days before the start of play), the maximum temperatures that day were 21C, followed by 17-19C, 18-20 (for Day 1), 22C, 24C, 29C and 25C (for Day 5).
Melbourne residents consider 30 degrees Celsius warm and the mid-30s hot, so no truly ‘hot’ weather was forecast. That’s why it was utter nonsense to talk like Page. And it turned out that the projections were generally a close match to reality when it occurred: 17.5 degrees Celsius on day 1, 19.7 degrees Celsius on day 2, 28.7 degrees Celsius on day 3 and 34.8 degrees Celsius on day 4 – the only really warm day – with 27 degrees Celsius expected tomorrow (day 5). Although of course it is the Met Office’s predictions and not the results that count for pitch preparation.
The costs resulting from play not extending beyond Day 2 are estimated at around A$10 million by Cricket Australia, which faces a large number of compensatory payouts to potential spectators, compounding the losses suffered at the start of the series in Perth.
*I’m wrong: Karl McDermott began his career as a groundsman in his early teens after leaving school in Dublin and began his work at Clontarf Cricket Club in that city.
#impressions #MCG #Groundsman #Curator #dont #mind