Psychedelic fur

PL on a day that saw 20 wickets fall in 75 overs in front of a record crowd

Wedged like kippers, we were, in the hotel lift this morning. Possibly the only Australian was I. The tourists fell into that easy chat tourists do when they find themselves among countrymen in a foreign field. “Bloody ‘ell,” offered a northern gent from the back corner, “it’s as cold as when Yorkshire play Scarborough at home,”. Another insult, they all agreed. They hadn’t come this far to be this cold.

Another growled that the pitch was covered in grass and the Australians, who had the inside word, had adjusted their side accordingly.

The first gent was right, or near enough. A check of the weather app in the morning indicated it was 12°C in East Melbourne, but “felt like” 7°C, and it was about the same overnight in Scarborough.

The second bloke was getting a bit carried away. Both sides are allowed to look at the strip, and England didn’t exactly get caught out by going with two spinners, did they?

But we do need to talk about the pitch.

Does the game really need wickets with so much grass that they resemble the nature strips we used to play Ashes games on in Bendigo when the lawnmower had packed it in?

Steve Smith said this thing was “furry”, which is a pejorative when referring to the Xmas ham you find at the back of the fridge in July and your tongue the morning after a night in Noosa.

And, it’s not exactly how you want to hear a pitch described heading into a Test, which fans from the Yarra Valley to Yorkshire were hoping would fill in the void between the Xmas and New Year’s hangovers.

Baz McCullum said recently that cricket’s not an “exact science”, nor is pitch preparation. Make it too flat, and you risk the horror acknowledged on the fourth line of the memorial in the MCG bar pictured below. That 2017 match is, as we like to say, still plodding toward its conclusion in an alternate universe (purgatory is a long, flat road where Test matches never conclude).

Reasons to drink

And, with the weather frigid and the pitch’s fringe hanging hippy long, England looked right at home with the ball in hand. They weren’t exactly clinical, but they got it right often enough, and Australia’s bats got it wrong often enough to see the home side, put in to bat by the visitors, rolled for 152 in 45.2 overs. That is the third-shortest innings by an Australian side in a home Ashes.

There’s no way a curator wants a wicket this lively; indeed, he’d said he wanted something that approximated last summer’s five-day thriller.

There was, however, within the Australian surrender, an opportunity for Cameron Green, whose performance this summer has come in for some criticism on these pages, to make a hero of himself. The all-rounder, who's been moving up and down the batting order like a nitrogen bubble in a Guinness glass, is batting at 7 in this match and thus came at the fall of Usman Khawaja’s wicket (29) with the home side 5-89. Alex Carey (20) didn’t hang around with him, but Michael Neser did, and the pair had put on an innings-high half-century partnership when Green (17) ran himself out. It was a shame; this was a free hit in many ways, and he looked somewhat freed in having it, but he found another way to get himself out.

Marnus Labuschagne, too, has fallen into that pre-axing habit of making batting look difficult, possibly more difficult than it should be, but at least in this case, they were difficult batting conditions.

On that note, I asked for CricViz data from Channel 7, and it confirmed the ball was jagging about as much as it appeared to be.