In the aftermath of the shambolic two day test at the MCG, a debate has ensued about the cause of the spectacular batting collapses. The now infamous 10 millimetres of grass is the primary culprit, with the finger pointed squarely at Curator Matt Page. Indeed, the official ICC verdict of ‘unsatisfactory’ seems to accord with the Cricviz difficulty rating of 8.9 – the most difficult Australian batting surface since such records began in 2006.
In response, some have claimed that it was not the fault of the pitch at all, rather it is the batters who are to blame. T20 cricket, with its demand for fast scoring has ruined the techniques of test batters. They don’t know how to dig-in in tough conditions, and they have eschewed front foot defence in favour of intemperate stroke play. But does this explanation stand up to scrutiny, or is it an example of confirmation bias?
The first thing worth noting is that the juxtaposition of these two explanations is a false dichotomy – there is no sensible reason why they should be mutually exclusive. It is entirely possible that the collapses could be due to multiple factors all interacting to varying degrees. But the haste and vehemence with which some have sought to blame T20 probably speaks more about their own pre-existing dislike for the shorter format. They are certain that T20 is ruining the game they love, and any batting collapse in a test match just confirms this view.
The T20 format has been around for two decades, and large numbers of test players have been alternating between the two for most of that time. That was certainly the case back in 2017 when a lifeless MCG pitch resulted in a dull draw that forced the MCC to completely upend the way that pitches were prepared. England batted only once in that test, and Dave Warner, famous for having transitioned from T20 to test cricket, ground out 86 from 277 balls in Australia’s second innings. In the same innings Steve Smith scored an unbeaten century from 275 balls. The very same Steve Smith who struggled like everyone else in this year’s equivalent game. Perhaps in the intervening eight years T20 has indeed ruined Smith’s technique and temperament, although this seems unlikely.
Smith is a seasoned veteran with over 10,000 runs to his name. Notorious for obsessing about the technical aspects of batting, it is hard to believe that his forays into the shortest format have so muddied his mind that he can’t remember how to block the ball. All of the current players work full time at their craft. They practice incessantly, and work with coaches on every aspect of their game. It beggars belief that they are missing some technical aspects of the game that is obvious to those in the stands, or the armchair experts watching at home.
This is not to deny that the visiting English team have played with an unprecedented recklessness in this series. Much has been spoken about Bazball, and it is clear is that this is a change of strategy – a deliberately more aggressive approach to batting and to the game in general. For better or worse, they were always going to play this way in Australia, and so there was no real need for a spicier pitch to be prepared for Melbourne or any other venue for that matter. Whatever the merits of Bazball, it has not been brought about by the English batters collectively losing their minds from playing too much T20. Prior to its introduction in 2022, English test players were playing about as much T20 as they are now. Under McCullum’s predecessor Chris Silverwood, England played a much more traditional style of test cricket, and it was largely unsuccessful.
In bringing this new style to the current Ashes series, the tests have been played in a much more helter-skelter fashion than previous series in Australia. Indeed, the 2024 Boxing Day test between Australia and India went the full five days and was very nearly a draw. Apparently the toxic influence of T20 had not sufficiently polluted the minds of the Australian players just twelve months ago.
Some have argued that many of the dismissals in Melbourne were not caused by a misbehaving pitch, but instead were simply due to poor decisions by the batters. Ricky Ponting made the point that we cannot just look at these dismissals in isolation – that they need to be understood in the context of what has happened previously. Ponting said “You’re playing a perfect forward defence to a ball that you think is going to hit the middle of the bat and you miss it by six inches, then that forces you to do something to try to survive or make runs”. If batters genuinely believe that there is inevitably a ball with their name on it at any moment, then they will try to adapt their strategy in response. This is not softness, as some have suggested, nor is it a brain explosion. And as Ponting goes on to point out – the batters who made the highest scores in Melbourne were those who batted aggressively.
Batting at Sheffield Shield and Test level in Australia appears to have become more challenging since Kookaburra changed the nature of the cricket balls they produced in 2021, adding lacquer and reinforcement of the seam. This was done deliberately, and in response to concerns that the bat was dominating the ball to such an extent that it was causing dull test matches. This was the same reason that curators began to ‘spice-up’ pitches around the same time. These measures were put in place for a reason and they have had the desired effect – bowlers have wrested back the ascendency, and with that comes the possibility that some matches will be disproportionately dominated by the bowlers. The Melbourne test was statistical outlier, nonetheless made more likely by decisions made over the previous few years.
For Greg Chappell, this was a tale of the frailty of pampered modern players, “cocooned in their bio-bubbles and lucrative contracts”, who failed to pay due respect the heroic deeds of past players like Rick McCosker and of course Bradman. Chappell is a giant of the game, and he commands respect. But when he bemoans the “petulance” of the players, and claims that they “betray a profound ignorance of the game’s storied past” he has abandoned facts and evidence in favour of emotive and unjustified assertions about the character of players. It is certainly true that teams of yesteryear faced difficult conditions, particularly in the era of uncovered wickets. But they also tried unorthodox tactics to counter them. In Melbourne in 1937, Bradman made the decision to reverse the Australian batting order, in order to protect his top order from a sticky wicket. They didn’t tough it out, they deployed a strategy that was designed to maximise their chances in difficult playing conditions. It is too easy to see what we want to see in events like this. Chappell’s starting position is that modern players lack the character of previous generations, no evidence will change that view, and the Melbourne batting collapse just confirms it.
My other hobby is politics, and I have seen a similar phenomena in post election analysis. We can never really have empirical certainty about why voters vote in a particular way. The best we have is opinion polling, which is useful to a point, but also sufficiently vague that analysts can ascribe any self-serving cause to a particular outcome. After every election there is a barrage of confused and contradictory analysis, in which those with agendas go to great lengths to argue that the result just confirms their pre-existing view. Like a Rorschach test, the viewer will read into the result whichever explanation they are predisposed to favour. The various explanations rely on unprovable, and thus unfalsifiable claims about what is going on in the minds of voters. Similarly, those who seek to only blame the batters for the debacle in Melbourne rely on heroic claims about batters’ minds that aren’t really supported by evidence.
It is undoubtedly true that this Ashes Series has seen some very short test matches, and batting collapses that have been at times hard to fathom. But attributing this to a collective weakness of character, or to the effect of T20 on batters’ minds, is not just wildly over-simplistic, it is unsupported by evidence. There have been poor shots played, as there are in every series. There have also been more challenging conditions and cricket balls and pitches designed to make batting more challenging than in the past. And one of the two teams has been playing a highly unorthodox, aggressive strategy.
For those of us deeply invested in the future of test cricket, the two day test match in Melbourne was unsettling and unsatisfying. It demands a measured, rational assessment of the causal factors rather than emotive conjecture.
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