About 15 minutes before lunch on day two of the Boxing Day Test, Usman Khawaja hooked Josh Tongue to fine leg for a second-ball duck and Cricket Australia chief executive Todd Greenberg took a deep breath.
Staring at a scoreboard showing Australia 5-83, Greenberg now knew he was looking squarely at the unmitigated disaster of a two-day finish for the biggest and most lucrative Test match of the year.
The moment CEO boss Todd Greenberg knew he was staring at a disastrous two-day Test.Credit: Getty Images
“When ‘Uzzy’ hooked one down to fine leg, that got to five down and I was pretty much a realist at that point,” Greenberg said. “When England came out to chase, it was only going to end one of two ways, either we were going to win on day two or they were going to get the runs on day two.
“For me in my mind, at that point, there was no middle ground.”
Greenberg was sitting in CA’s hospitality suite in the Harrison Room. Not long after the lunch break, he called Melbourne Cricket Club chief executive Stuart Fox, who was a couple of hundred metres away in the MCC Committee Room. The exchange wasn’t heated, but it was blunt.
“They’re disappointed it’s gone two days,” Fox said of CA. “That’s the feedback. We’re not the first Test to go two days this year. Those two Tests, there’s an implication.”
Usman Khawaja signs autographs on what should have been day three of the Boxing Day Test. Credit: Getty Images for Cricket Australia
“We were talking in the morning before play, and we were both trying to guess where the day would go – neither of our guesses eventuated. But we were in constant contact [after that],” Greenberg said.
“To their credit, [the MCC] have created great wickets over a period since the change in 2017 and as I said to Stuart, the margins for error are so small, and so on this occasion they got it wrong. Everyone pays a heavy price for that, but that’s the reality. They didn’t get this one right.“
For Fox and his staff, this involved activating scenarios for day two to be the final day of the Test: notifying hospitality staff of shift changes, contacting charities about the repurposing of food already prepared for days three and four, and discussing how they would explain a two-day game to the world.
MCG curator Matthew Page fronts the media on Sunday with his boss, MCC CEO Stuart Fox.Credit: Wayne Taylor
Greenberg’s mind, meanwhile, raced briefly back to discussions that had taken place in Perth around the possibility of playing a T20 game on one of the remaining scheduled days of play.
CA chair Mike Baird and former Melbourne Stars and Collingwood president Eddie McGuire (a CA hospitality guest this week) were among those eager to see it happen. But it fell to Joel Morrison, CA’s head of events, to provide a reminder of logistical impossibility.
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“First conversation was clearly, ‘we’re not going to get to day three, so this one’s going to sting’,” Greenberg said. “Then we started to think about what we could do today [Sunday]... Everyone’s mind went to ‘let’s play another game, let’s turn it into a T20’ and all those things I can understand.
“Those conversations were real [after the first Test ended in two days] in Perth.
“But the reality is people have purchased tickets for a Test match, they’ve paid a price at a set point, they do a transaction with us, so everyone’s got to get a refund. To turn that around in such a short space of time is very difficult. Not to mention the fact that we’ve got to prepare for another Test match with Test Championship points.”
Watching the Boxing Day broadcast at home in Adelaide on Friday morning, Australia’s doyen of pitch preparation Les Burdett had an uneasy feeling about the pitch he could see on TV. Now 74, having retired as Adelaide Oval curator in 2010, Burdett still serves as CA’s pitch adviser, speaking with groundsmen around the country and also the head of cricket operations Peter Roach.
When the clock ticked past 10am Melbourne time, Burdett knew it was too late to take any more grass off the thickly matted MCG surface.
Australia coach Andrew McDonald inspects the MCG pitch on Christmas Eve. Credit: Getty Images
“When you look at the curator’s role, we are able to do whatever we like until half an hour before the start of the game, and once the coin is tossed, the running of the game is in the hands of the umpires,” Burdett said.
“During the morning, the pitch is swept and cut at the same cutting height it was cut on day one. You’re not allowed to change the cutting height of the mower for the duration of the game. Once the first day was over, he couldn’t change the cutting height or do anything else to that end.
“When I saw this one on the morning of day one, I thought ‘mmm, yeah’. Before a ball was bowled, you could see how much grass was on it. So I thought, ‘well, I guess Pagey knows what he’s doing’. I marked his pitch last year as the best for the series. I congratulated Pagey and said, ‘mate, that was the best one’. So to turn around now ... the lawnmower broke down.”
Former Adelaide Oval curator Les Burdett, who is now a pitch adviser to Cricket Australia.Credit: Sebastian Costanzo
As the game took on a breakneck pace, with 20 wickets falling on day one, Page said he was in a “state of shock” at what transpired. For Burdett, the procession of wickets was not foreseeable.
“I know Pagey would’ve had the best intentions for the game, but this just went a bit pear-shaped on him,” he said. “I’ve never been a big advocate for too much grass anyway because it’s far better when the ball touches the clay and the ball comes onto the bat and it opens the game up.
“Then you get the opportunity for spikes to get into the clay, and you’ve got up and down bounce. If you happen to have too much grass, what can happen is the ball can actually, instead of sliding off the surface, it goes into the pile of grass and jumps at you. A bit of grass is fine... On this one, it was just a bit too coarse. The 10 millimetres he would have got away with, but it seemed to me the grass was a bit coarse.
“When you watched [Marnus] Labuschagne get hit a couple of times on the hands, that ball just hit the pitch and jumped. There’s balloon bounce where the pitch is a bit soft and the ball can balloon up like a tennis ball, but when it’s hard it can grab the grass and move sideways or jump at you. So sadly, that’s what happened here.”
But Burdett does point out that a trend towards grassier pitches has brought more of the unknown into the game at the same time as batsmen have got more proactive and bowlers more durable.
Marnus Labuschagne copped one at the MCG.Credit: Getty Images
“Players now are far more urgent about what they do,” he said. “Cricketers are entertainers and it is right that they do try to move the game.
“There were some flat tracks around the place in the past, and I’d rather an enthralling draw than a quick two-day one. It’s still up to the individual cricketer how he approaches the game, too.”
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This is a key point for Greenberg as he looks at how to avoid more such rapid finishes to Test matches. Is pitch preparation out of step with how the game is now being played?
“With the way batters are batting and the way the game is evolving, are the wickets in lockstep with that or are they not, and if they’re not, how do we ensure they are so we can try to balance the commercial implications versus the performance,” Greenberg said.
“This is not an exact science. I feel sometimes talking to the people who prepare wickets that it’s all about the secret herbs and spices that go into it. I’m not suggesting this is easy and the margins are very fine, but I’m not sure if those conversations have been had over the last couple of years as the game has evolved. That’s the conversation I want to pick up at the end of the series.”
On Sunday morning, before he fronted a packed press conference to explain what had happened in the middle, Page received a consoling message from Burdett, who has long counselled curators to balance the competing demands of commerce, team performance and the “right thing by cricket”. But he is hesitant to be too prescriptive.
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”I wouldn’t like someone coming to my paddock and telling me what to do,” Burdett said.
“My role with CA has been not to tell them what to do. I’m here to support you in any issues you’ve got and hopefully collectively you and I can gameplan, and you need to take ownership of that gameplan.
“Nobody is hurting more at the moment than Matty Page,” Burdett said. “I sent him a quiet message this morning to say, ‘I hope you’re ok mate, if you want to chat, give me a call.’ It’s very, very lonely when things go wrong as a curator.”
