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Was that fun? Was that … good? Certainly a lot happened in the Boxing Day Test. Those who paid their money saw action. But generally the cricketing public wants wickets and runs in vague equilibrium, not the odd run dribbling out of a hole in the dismissal vortex.
Even the season of excess can have too much of a good thing. This wasn’t just overloading on Christmas dinner, it was saddling up for the festive meal at an all-you-can-eat sushi train with the conveyor belt turned up to five times normal speed.
Without context, the setup sounds tremendous. An Ashes Test, a run chase, a tricky pitch, a huge crowd, 175 runs required against a quality attack. The line for tickets starts here.
And yet, waiting for the final innings to begin at the MCG this year, the overwhelming sense was that whatever happened next didn’t matter at all. We were about to see a fourth innings take place the day after Boxing Day, for pity’s sake, just after lunch on the second day of the match.
Such had been the extent of Australia’s subsidence that morning, and England’s the previous afternoon, and Australia’s before that. Thirty wickets in just over four sessions, one wicket remaining in the match for each of the 10 sessions still available. Only one of those sessions would be needed, whoever won.
Everyone in the ground knew no England player would attempt to combat the pitch with guts and patience and skill. They would, in keeping with their preferred sport, tee off and hope for the best. It would not be a game of ability or nerve, but a cartoon cloud of dust and fists and boots from which one side would emerge holding a winner’s ticket.
Can you care about a scramble between teams too hungover to care themselves? One was coming down from the high of series victory, the other processing the toxins of defeat. Do we blame Cricket Australia’s insistence on scheduling their showpieces, Boxing Day and the New Year Test, as the final two encounters when that so often makes them obsolete?
But then, both teams played a similar match when the series was fresh in Perth. Do we blame the bounce there, the 10mm of grass in Melbourne? Neither was an impossible deck. Both hosted batting that can’t stand up to difficulty. Do we blame smartphone brains that can’t concentrate for longer than it takes to scroll past a Korean toddler singing the bridge of Golden?
Until Perth, it had been over a century since a two-day Ashes match; since Perth it has been four weeks. Australia’s third innings in Melbourne was as bad as England’s in the west, a brainless scatter of shots assuming that a lively pitch would render sufficient whatever scant lead they scraped. Instead the Melbourne surface eased a touch.
England’s openers chanced their arms, followed by a pinch-slogger at No 3, then the supplanted No 3 who was picked on the basis of looking good in the Warwickshire T20 side two seasons ago. The vice-captain smeared at mid-wicket while doing the splits, then air-practiced the shot doing even wider splits.
The captain got out aiming for the Yarra River. England didn’t so much reach the target as crash a clown car into it, six wickets down. Is this Test cricket? Is it real? Is it worth anyone’s time?
These questions aren’t just the dying yawp of traditionalism. They’re about something bigger than the players who happen to be in the middle right now. Those players paced out the final act in sunshine that made brilliant green the grass under their feet, in a show watched by more than 92,000 people, after 94,000 the day before.
This is where this half-match, this abortive contest, is just sad. Another sellout was listed for the third day. Huge crowds would have arrived impromptu for a fourth, even a fifth. People had built their week around this prospect, arranged their holidays, driving up to the city, booking in their time. Tourists were landing from England on 26 or 27 December, coming to tick an MCG Test off their bucket list, settling for later days given how readily Boxing Day tickets sellout.
None of that will happen now. There will be talk about the money lost, the damage to Cricket Australia budgets, the independent vendors stranded with unsellable stock, the broadcasters complaining about bang for buck, all of which matter to varying extents depending how rich someone was to begin with.
More than anything, though, there is the pace of life through this post-Christmas week, the period that is supposed to be set to the slow-ticking clock of Test cricket, while phones and watches of the normal ilk are briefly set aside. Waking up on 28 December with no cricket to switch on will be wrong, in some deeper way. England’s win could fairly be described as hollow, a shootout that sets them at 3-1 in a series lost, but had Australia taken four more wickets on this second afternoon, the gonging emptiness at the centre of this display would have rung as loud.
