The pitch at the Melbourne Cricket Ground was deemed “unsatisfactory” by the International Cricket Council’s pitch and outfield monitoring process and received a point deduction.
The match came after a hectic 4th Ashes Test, which ended after just two days of play, with 36 wickets taken in just 142 overs and no batsman able to score a half-century.
Thanks in part to the pitch at the MCG, England have achieved their first Test win on Australian soil since 2011, but Australia have won the first three Tests and already retain the Ashes.
Curator Matthew Page admitted he was in “a state of shock” as the penultimate match of the series was played on a surface with 10mm of grass remaining, creating extravagant movement for seam bowlers.
Despite England winning by four wickets, captain Ben Stokes felt Melbourne’s pitch would be “hell” if it were made anywhere else in the world, and the ICC gave it the second-lowest rating.
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England captain Ben Stokes reflected on the ‘tricky’ pitch at the MCG after his team’s two-day win
Match umpire Geoff Crowe said: “The pitch at the MCG was too favorable to the bowlers. With 20 wickets falling on the first day and 16 on the second, with no batsmen even reaching a half-century, the pitch was ‘unsatisfactory’ as per the guidelines and the venue was given one point deduction.”
Pitches are rated as either “very good,” “satisfactory,” “unsatisfactory,” or “inadequate.” If a stadium receives six demerit points in five years, it will be banned from hosting international matches for 12 months.
The pitch in the first Test in Perth last month, which lasted two days and saw Australia take the lead for the fifth time in a row, received the ICC’s highest rating of “very good”.
Sky Sports pundit Michael Atherton said of the surface: “It was a shootout on a difficult pitch, but in terms of spectacle it was not satisfactory.”
“You come to see different skills and watch the game develop over a period of time. Sometimes you run into extreme situations, but we’ve had two (two-day tests) in this series now and I don’t think we want to see that too often.”
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Sky Sports’ Nasser Hussain and Michael Atherton look back at how England avoided a potential Ashes whitewash after ending 18 Tests in Australia and a 15-year winless streak
There was no spin bowling in the match, with Sky Sports’ Nasser Hussain saying, “It was farcical at times. It can be thrilling, but there are traditionalists who like ebbs and flows and slow developments. This wasn’t slow, it was fast forward. We’ve had enough of that through T10, T20 and The Hundred.”
Broad: ‘Unacceptable’ too much pitch in MCG test
Stuart Broad, England’s second-highest Test wicket-taker, added: “Having two two-day Test matches in a series is remarkable and it’s bad for the game. Not getting 50 in a Test match is unacceptable.”
“It’s disappointing because on the third day here in Melbourne on Sunday there were going to be kids who had tickets for Christmas but couldn’t come.
“There was too much movement on the pitch. When you’re a Test match bowler, you don’t need to give that level of support. The art of Test match bowling is to extract movement from a surface that lower-level bowlers think is flat. There was too much movement on the surface.”
England’s repechage victory would leave them 3-1 ahead with only the final Test in Sydney remaining, and the financial impact on Cricket Australia is expected to be around £5 million, reportedly in the region of £5 million.
A sold-out crowd of more than 90,000 people was scheduled for the third day, but if there were no games on Sunday, there would be an avalanche of refunds and lost merchandise, food and drink sales.
The final Test of the series will be held in Sydney from January 4.
Ashes Series in Australia 2025-26
Australia leads the five-game series with three wins and one loss.
