GREG BLEWETT: Tradition is being thrown out the window with fast-forward Australian Test pitches

I left the bizarre two-day Boxing Day Test in Melbourne this week feeling completely unsatisfied. But while the cricket world quickly piled on to the MCG pitch and curator Matt Page, I have, for a while, been thinking about what wickets actually look like across the country, and there are some questions that need to be asked. This isn’t just an issue this summer either; it’s something that’s been happening for the past four or five years. We are going away from what our traditional Test pitches are like in Australia, and I haven’t heard one good reason why we’re doing it. We’re used to hard and normally fast pitches with nowhere near as much grass as they’re leaving on them these days. They used to allow for deterioration — and maybe a bit of reverse-swing — later in the match which introduces a new tactical challenge. Let’s take Perth as an example. I played my cricket at the WACA Ground, and while they talk about using the same soil for matches at Optus Stadium, there is far more grass left on the deck. Forever and a day, the Perth pitch cracked up, especially if you got warm weather. I copped a ball once there that basically went underground from Curtly Ambrose because it hit a crack and shot low into the stumps. And you know what, that’s fine, because deterioration of the pitch is part and parcel of playing Test cricket. I don’t think Brisbane has changed an awful lot, but there’s a lot more grass on my home ground in Adelaide, definitely in Melbourne and Sydney is a completely new beast now. Cricket Australia started using a re-designed Kookaburra ball back in 2021. It has more lacquer on the outside but also a more pronounced seam. For some reason, this came in about the same time we started leaving more grass on pitches here. Surely we need just one or the other, because at the moment we are wreaking havoc. The problem all this creates is we are starting to lose some of the craft around batting. Players in the Boxing Day Test felt the need to go out and play their shots because they believed that otherwise, there was a ball that was going to get them out sooner rather than later. That’s not the type of batting 90,000 people at the MCG or millions watching and listening around the country want, is it? I know I left the ground feeling nowhere near satisfied by the contest. It wasn’t about the result either, because I felt exactly the same out of Perth. You just feel cheated, and it was a massive letdown. The same goes at Sheffield Shield level as well. I spent three years in the South Australia setup not long ago, and I saw up close the sort of wickets that are being prepared there. In my era, batters were asked to score thousands of runs to press their case to make the Test side. Now, we’re asking batters to do the same, but giving them far more difficult conditions to deal with. It’s not just the batters either, when Steve Smith was asked why not a single over of spin was bowled in the Melbourne Test, he replied “why would you?”. If domestic teams are playing on the same sort of wickets, it’s going to do our spin stocks no good.