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Opinion
I write this on a sunny Melbourne Friday afternoon. It’s 31 degrees today, the crickets are a couple of hours away and the bustling of the school pick-up is about to begin.
And that will be followed by people trying to get home from work at around 4pm, some of them on their last working day of the year. There is relief and excitement about what the next two weeks will bring.
Thousands and thousands of kids can’t wait to get home and it’s timed perfectly. They will be home somewhere around the first ball of the second day of the Adelaide Oval Test match.
The scores are poised at 2-212 after some costly mistakes by the English late in the day. ‘The Poms couldn’t catch a cold’ is their father’s joke.
(Photo by Mark Brake – CA/Cricket Australia via Getty Images)
Don’t get me wrong, the Adelaide day-night Test has morphed into its own phenomenon. It is a special day in the Australian sporting calendar.
However, this Test is just an entrée for the main course in just over a week, the Boxing Day Test match at the MCG.
There’s something unexplainable and unique about Day 1 of the Boxing Day Test. I know families who have been going year on year for more than half a century.
It typifies this city, which in recent times has had its heart ripped out by a pandemic of the likes of which we haven’t seen for a century.
There has been no AFL, and no sport, which is the beating heart of Melbourne. I love this city and in some strange way, I feel like this city loves me.
The skyscrapers such as the Eureka Skydeck, which I’ve been to the top of numerous times, have a sense of home, and that long walk either from Flinders Street or through the Yarra and the Botanical Gardens gives me a sense of hope, excitement, and belonging.
As you get on the train of the morning of Day 1, with some sore heads around you from Christmas Day (maybe your own!), it’s a feeling that is hard to put into words.
There’s a sense of excitement and calm. You hear talk about the festive period, talk about the day ahead, and the everlasting conversation of whether you want the Aussies to bat or bowl first.
The unity of 100,000 people wanting the same thing, and supporting the same thing, is truly an amazing thing.
(Michael Willson/AFL Media/Getty Images)
There are no arguments in the crowd (maybe from the behavioural awareness officers down in Bay 13), and there is a sense of celebration, especially if the Australians are on top and you either see a five-for or a big Boxing Day hundred – the hardest to get in Test cricket.
Which brings me to the game itself (well the series anyway), which is the Ashes. We love to hate England, and they love too to hate us.
The Barmy Army will arguably get their biggest turn out in Melbourne, which is the city in which the English people seem to have settled in mostly in Australia.
I mean, who can blame them? The great Bill Lawry apparently once said “I was born extra lucky. I was born an Australian and I was born a Victorian”.
It’s a very healthy rivalry though. Full credit to the Barmy Army, they make the Ashes what it is and are arguably the best sporting fans in the universe.
They, combined with the mighty Bay 13, make the day what it is: a celebration of people. A ‘convict colony’ as the Barmy Army would say, against the Poms.
There is the history – Bodyline, Edgbaston, Headingley, and Ben Stokes heroics that saved England from a proper series defeat, Shane Warne’s 700th, and the might of both Don Bradman and Steve Smith in English conditions.
(Hamish Blair/Getty Images)
This ground has seen some famous moments. In cricket, noticeably, as already spoken about, there is Warne’s 700th wicket, and Mitchell Starc cleaning up Brendon McCullum in the first over of the World Cup final.
I’ve still never heard a roar like it. We were champions of the world after that delivery and the rest of the day was a celebration.
Which brings me to the reason I wrote this in the first place, and that is what Boxing Day means too me.
I don’t want to sound repetitive, but we live in the sporting capital of the world. Our crowds and our passion for the game are unmatched anywhere else in the world.
For too long during this pandemic, this city has missed its beating heart. And for me, Boxing Day of 2021 will in many ways be freedom day.
One hundred thousand people will descend on that famous ground. The roar of the crowd in the first ball – especially if we bowl first and Rory Burns faces Starc – is spine-tingling.
You know you’re alive, and you will know life is getting back to somewhere near normal again.
This is Melbourne, Australia. Sport is this city, and this city is sport.
A sense of hope, togetherness, and enjoyment, which we haven’t experienced in a sporting sense for over two years, will finally be back.
This is the Boxing Day Test match. Go Aussies!
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