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Whateley: A shameful moment for the MCG
Gerard Whateley • December 29th, 2025 12:37 pm
It was a malfunctioning pitch at the MCG.
You can pick the moment where they lost faith in the surface completely. It was the two balls that bowled Jake Weatherald and Travis Head.
Head’s reaction in particular - the gallows laughter that came after - that was unplayable because of the surface, not because of the skill of Brydon Carse.
Perth was about careless batting and incredible nerves. The players owned Perth, but the pitch owned Melbourne, regrettably.
This was something completely off. I don’t think there’s any world in the multiverse that the game is still going today on that surface.
We have to own this as Victorians and Melburnians. This was malfunction, this was a chronic error of judgment.
It undermined what would have been one of the great events in this city. The two crowds that we got broke the world record for single days of Test cricket.
People were bang up for this despite the fact that it was a dead rubber.
The ground as it was presented and the pitch as it was given to the players was unfit for purpose.
I did admire yesterday that they all owned it - Stuart Fox and Matt Page - in the most peculiar press conference you would see associated with a summer of cricket.
This is a shameful moment for the MCG. Nobody meant for it to happen. But it did happen.
We have to front up to it, be honest to it. We can’t dance around this.
Cricket is in an existential crisis regarding the long form of the game. But this is the exception. If we base all of our conclusions on this game we’ll completely skew what’s going on.
A decision was made, it was a miscalculation, it was a foreseeable error, it ignores the way both teams have played this series and was married to the weather.
Everyone will feel terrible about it, but we have to be honest enough to go, ’No, the MCG failed in circumstances where it usually soars’.
It’s our home Test and we should be profoundly disappointed and honest enough to say, ‘That is not good enough’.
It's not fair on one person
It was a miscalculation that has to be owned.
The long term question is the how and the why, and who has the right to make these decisions.
The curator at each ground wields such power. There’s no sport that relies so much on the conditions and the decisions of one person who is not involved in the game more than cricket.
I do think this becomes a moment in time where the autonomy of Australian curators will probably be wound in with good cause.
There should be a policy from the governing body.
I’ve been extremely critical of the Sydney pitch for half a dozen years now. It has no characteristics at all.
Why hasn’t it returned to the days where two spinners would play in both sides?
This is a moment for the governing body to have at least a say, if not an influence, or a guiding policy in place.
Because it really is not ok that the cricket ecosystem misses out on $25 million in the biggest summer we’ve ever seen because of the miscalculation of one person.
It’s not fair on the one person, and it’s derelict in the duty of the governing body.
It’s not to say that we doctor pitches but that decision can’t be made by one person going forward.
