What are you doing here, mate?” an ex-colleague inquired with wide-eyed incredulity, as though we were meeting in a Siberian prison camp rather than an Australian press box. “Didn’t someone tell you the Ashes are already over?”
It had been mentioned. Twenty-four hours contorted into airplane seats – from Heathrow to Melbourne, via Hong Kong – had afforded me ample time to ponder the poor decisions of the England men’s cricket team and my former self. If there’s one thing cricket will always provide, it’s a mirror for personal failings.
Pre-series, former bowler Stuart Broad called this Australia team “the worst since 2010”. He was right. England managed their second-quickest defeat all the same.
This collapse has been especially painful because, for reasons that remain unclear, a heady delusion had infected the nation vis-a-vis the capabilities of our brave and brilliant boys.
It seduced at least 3,000 fans – myself included – to book flights for the later Melbourne and Sydney matches, knowing they might arrive with the series already decided. An estimated 40,000 more have flown out across the series, with at least half of those still in Australia. The Barmy Army, an England supporters’ club, sold 1,500 tickets to a Christmas Day dinner. On Christmas Eve, Melbourne’s suburbs buckled under the weight of tens of thousands of poms.
And so to Boxing Day at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG), the biggest stadium in the southern hemisphere and the city’s greatest cultural touchstone, for one of sport’s truly transcendent occasions.
Following the coldest Melbourne Christmas in two decades, a deceptive sun enveloped the pristine turf, but a full house of sweaters on-pitch betrayed the truth. “The Lord has given England an advantage today,” one fan quipped. “The English weather.”
Everything about the MCG is supersized; so steep and ceaseless that players say you can lose your bearings and balance standing in its midst. Outside the stadium stood a giant inflatable Ashes urn, a full-size ferris wheel, and a cheery man in cricket whites navigating the concourse one stilt at a time. The only exception to the Brobdingnagian spectacle was a pair of chainmailed crusaders aged, at a push, eight and 10.
From budgie smugglers and kangaroo shirts to sun-stained Brits double-parked at 10am, the cliches were having a ball
From budgie smugglers and kangaroo shirts to sun-stained Brits double-parked at 10am, the cliches were having a ball.
At final count there were 94,199 people inside the G, the highest Test match attendance ever. The cheapest tickets were £30, a quarter of the price of the least expensive adult ticket for the Lord’s Test against India this summer. They were treated to an anxiety dream of a day’s cricket, the ball careering about as though bewitched, all 20 batters looking like they had just been visited by three Christmas ghosts.
Like thousands of others, I flew more than 10,000 miles to spend Christmas on the other side of the world for a series already decided. And yet no one I’ve spoken to seems to regret a thing – they’re just glad to be here.
Play was frothy and absurd – the first time in 74 years 20 wickets fell on the same day during a Test in Australia; England’s lowest batting total of the current regime. But it was also vivid, transfixing and somehow, it felt consequential.
Photograph by Graham Denholm - CA/Cricket Australia via Getty