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Melbourne draw has enhanced this Ashes series, not detracted from it

1st January, 2018
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Alastair Cook is one of the best ever. (Photo by Morgan Hancock/Action Plus via Getty Images)
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1st January, 2018
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Test cricket is the wonderful sporting spectacle it is because of the nature of the drawn fourth Ashes Test in Melbourne, not in spite of it.

Unsurprisingly, since the end of the Boxing Day Test – and even before it finished, to be fair – if the talk hasn’t been about the run-scoring feats of Steven Smith and Alastair Cook, it’s been about the state of the drop-in wicket at the MCG.

Depending on which extreme you want to go, the wicket was primarily responsible for the death of this Test match, or Test cricket itself.

And let’s not beat around the bush, it wasn’t a great pitch.

I mean, the former batsman in me would have loved to have batted on it, and from a potential run-scoring perspective it may go down as one of the greatest cricket wickets ever prepared. But from the perspective of needing to take twenty wickets to win a match over the course of five days on a deck that didn’t so much evolve, as it just existed out in the middle of the great cricket coliseum, it wasn’t a great pitch.

The headlines since the Test concluded don’t make for great reading either, starting with outright blame and populism.

MCG drop-ins under review after bore draw” (ESPN CricInfo)

Cricket was the loser in this tedious Test farce” (The Australian)

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How the MCG pitch which produced the boring Boxing Day draw came to be” (Fox Sports)

Shane Warne says day-night Test will solve MCG pitch farce” (Daily Telegraph)

Then there were pieces from the hand-wringing extreme.

Lifeless drop-in pitch does Test cricket no favours” (The Times)

…before finally moving onto interstate parochialism.

Drop-in wicket should never be allowed at SCG after MCG shocker” (Sydney Morning Herald)

All of them carry degrees of validity. But the signs were also there. In the three Sheffield Shield games played there before the Test, 36, 27, and 23 wickets fell at the expense of 1310, 846, and 974 runs, respectively. The first two games included second innings declarations, and Victoria batted just once in the third.

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Boxing Day

(Photo by Scott Barbour/Getty Images)

After the highs of the Adelaide and Perth contests (and that’s not at all to suggest Brisbane was a doddle), Melbourne was always going to present the biggest challenge to Australia achieving their third Ashes whitewash in the last four home series.

But if we’re honest with ourselves, and what we know and love Test cricket to be – a complicated but intoxicating mix of a simple game and changing conditions – achieving a result in a Test match isn’t supposed to be easy. Traffic over the course of five days, let alone a five-Test series is rarely completely one-way.

The Melbourne draw serves as a timely reminder of why the three Tests that preceded were so good to watch for cricket lovers. As it stands, there were so many superb elements to the Boxing Day Test that don’t deserve to be lost in the throng of ‘The pitch was crap’ commentary that is still dominating.

Cook’s fifth double century and third-highest score overall now means the 33-year-old has resumed control over his destiny as a Test batsman; Stuart Broad’s first innings 4/51 marked a crucial comeback for a player who by his own admission couldn’t really disagree with much of the criticism of his performance in the series.

David Warner posted a second consecutive MCG Test century and was on track for a third; Smith’s match output created yet more records again, and Mitch Marsh’s second innings 166-ball 29 not out may, in time, become even more valuable to the Australian team than his 181 in Perth a fortnight earlier.

England still had a chance of forcing a result, too. When Shaun Marsh pushed at a delivery from Broad just before Lunch on Day 5, Australia’s second-innings lead was just 14, and Warner had departed only seven overs earlier.

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Smith had only just reached his fifty. They’d have known, just as a nervous Australian dressing room and plenty of nervous Australian fans knew, that even just one more wicket soon after lunch would’ve thrown the game wide open.

Instead, Smith and Mitch Marsh survived another 48.2 overs from that point to achieve the draw.

Steve Smith scores his second Ashes hundred

Was this Steve Smith’s best Test century? AFP PHOTO / GREG WOOD

Reports of Test cricket’s demise on the back of this one drawn Test are, as seems to be the case with most knee-jerk commentary these days, grossly exaggerated.

There was so much engrossing cricket played in Melbourne that it’s not funny. Even the rain breaks over the last two days helped add to the intrigue of the contest.

You want to look at a result that doesn’t help Test cricket’s cause? Check out the scorecard of the South Africa-Zimbabwe Boxing Day Test in Port Elizabeth, a match scheduled as a four-day match but didn’t even require Tea on Day 2.

The Ashes will stay in Australia; that much has been decided already. But the Melbourne draw has ensured the Fifth Test in Sydney this week starts as a very even contest.

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And whatever the result in Sydney, the Melbourne draw will have played a huge role in its significance in the context of the broader series result.

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