Boxing Day at the cricket is one of Australia’s secular feast days, along with the NRL grand final and the Melbourne Cup.
Throughout Australia’s 15-year reign over the game straddling the turn of the century, Boxing Day became a kind of annual celebration of that mastery. It culminated in 2006, when Shane Warne took his 700th Test wicket on Boxing Day, triggering another win in what became an Ashes whitewash.
Warne tragically left us this year, as did fellow cricket stars Rod Marsh and Andrew Symonds, and as another Boxing Day dawns, Australian cricket finds itself in a disconcertingly unsettled state. It is to an extent counterintuitive, since the Test team is ranked No.1 in the world and the women’s team continues to carry all before it. But it is undeniable.
The Test summer has been underwhelming. The West Indies were feeble opponents in two Tests (and yet because of Byzantine scheduling will be back next summer for two more). The pitches in Perth and Adelaide were bland. A sporty pitch in Brisbane for South Africa made for a more bracing contest and spectacle, but it lasted less than two days, occasioning a “below average” rating for the pitch from the International Cricket Council. Too little one day, too much the next; it’s the story of Australian cricket just now.
One-day cricket is lost in space. More has not proved better for the expanded Big Bash League; it’s lost its mojo. Perth begged to get back its Test after two COVID-shuttered years, and got it, but locals shunned it.
Arguably, the two most memorable days of cricket this summer were from the T20 World Cup and did not involve Australia. One day, 90,000 made the MCG shake for an India-Pakistan clash. There were 80,000 more for the final, won by England, who are on the march in all forms of the game. Must we say it? OK. Well done, England.
Cricket Australia’s board is in a state of constant flux and its management is in a crisis of indecision and outsourcing. Seeking to have his lifetime captaincy ban overturned, David Warner was asked to submit to a protracted process. Because of it, the malodorous stench from the 2018 Cape Town ball-tampering scandal has re-emerged to haunt the game here. Warner aborted anyway.
But after years of painstaking work to re-endear themselves to their public, the Australian team still struggle to hold all hearts. In a diversifying sporting landscape, cricket cannot presume to be the national sport any more. During the FIFA World Cup, Socceroos coach Graham Arnold said repeatedly that only the Socceroos and the Matildas truly unite Australia, and he may be right. It is as well for CA that the Socceroos appear so rarely on these shores.
Even at the meta level, cricket is at sixes and sevens. Cricket can have had no grumpier broadcaster than Seven. Even as it negotiates for the next tranche of rights, it is suing CA for failing to provide worthwhile content. It is not clear whether Seven wants the rights or wants to be relieved of them, but the effect has been to depress the worth of the next lot of rights and to further discolour the game.
For better or worse, sport is its own restorative. Better, because who doesn’t like winning? It needs no explanation. Worse, because winning sometimes camouflages dysfunction.
Twelve months ago, Scott Boland made his extraordinary debut in the Boxing Day Test, taking 6-7 in the second innings to speed Australia to victory over England early on the third day. It was the feel-good sports story of the past year, the very stuff of Boxing Day legend. It was easy to gloss over the fact that that pitch was given a bare pass mark by the ICC referee, Australia’s own David Boon.
All eyes again are on the pitch and Boland today, the former to see how it plays and the latter to see how he performs after injured frontliner Josh Hazlewood withdrew.
These sorts of intrigues are the marrow of cricket and of Boxing Day. When the umpire calls “play”, we will all knowingly narrow our focus, forgetting for now what besets the game and absorbing ourselves once more in what is beguiling about it. And that’s as it should be.
Lest anyone on either side of the fence takes for granted what, despite everything, we should cherish on Boxing Day, a glance up at the Shane Warne stand nameplate ought to pull them up.
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