This first for SA-Aussie cricket will also be a last
Cricket’s international landscape has never shifted as dramatically and as quickly as it is at the moment, and there will be another “first” in eight days’ time when Dean Elgar leads his Test squad to Brisbane for the first of three Tests in Australia. Actually, it will be a “last”.
Never again will SA be a part of the greatest fortnight that Test cricket has to offer. The first five post-isolation series between the countries included Tests in Melbourne and Sydney during the holiday season, but the last two, in 2012 and 2016, were played out of season in Hobart, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide.
There may be comparisons in other sports but nothing compares in cricket, specifically Test cricket, to the festive season Test matches in Australia. Merely visiting the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) on a non-match day inspires awe, but the memories of attending an international fixture last a lifetime. To compete in one is, irrefutably, a career highlight — whatever happens on the field.
Melbournians, it is said, would fill a sporting theatre to watch two cockroaches race up a wall, so it is little wonder that they turn up in such numbers at the MCG, or “The G”, as their cherished monument to sport is affectionately known.
The Boxing Day Test is a beloved ritual for many thousands of families as well as the patrons and members who fill the hundreds of hospitality suites.
Among the stadium’s many remarkable features is the ease of access — the majority of a 90,000-strong crowd can fill and empty the venue within an hour. Huge, sweeping walkways provide access on foot to the city centre, but there are also trams, buses, a dedicated train station and vast taxi ranks to ferry people to the iconic stadium.
Cricket crowds rarely fill the place to capacity unless India are playing or it’s a World Cup final, but there will be close to 70,000 on December 26 when Elgar leads an SA team onto the field for the last time.
It is really during Aussie Rules Football season where the ground comes alive on a weekly basis with four out the 18 teams in the league — Richmond, Collingwood, Hawthorn and Melbourne — playing their home games at The G and attracting crowds in excess of 60,000.
There is a famous story about Allan Border and his West Indian counterpart, Richie Richardson, as they walked out to toss at the start of the Boxing Day Test of 1992. The visiting captain surveyed the Great Southern Stand, teeming to the brink, and asked his host: “How many people does that stand hold?” Border replied: “About 48,000, I think.” Richardson, who was born in the smaller part of Antigua and Barbuda, muttered: “That’s more people than live in my country.” Which was true.
Straight after the MCG comes New Year in Sydney, beginning with the fireworks above the Opera House. The cricket tourists are routinely entertained on a boat with champagne and snacks — it’s quite the experience. And it was a wet one too for head coach Mickey Arthur, who fulfilled his promise to jump overboard in 2008 if his SA team became the first to win a series in 98 years of trying.
The SCG may be half the size of the MCG but it lacks none of the atmosphere, somehow preserving the “grunt” for which it was famous in the 1980s and ‘90s alongside the more “genteel” and corporate clients who, like their Melbournian contemporaries, dress for the occasion and attend as much to be seen as to watch the game.
SA’s own New Year Test at Newlands is a popular and well-attended occasion, but the traditional Boxing Day Test remains a foster child. It seemed a reasonable compromise to sacrifice the home international holiday season once every four years in order to give the Proteas players the experience of playing in Australia, especially with Cricket Australia paying Cricket SA compensation, as it will do next month.
But with the SA20 set to establish itself in January and February for the next 10 years at least, the holiday season at home is one of the few remaining windows in which Cricket SA can schedule international fixtures. The executive has already indicated to Cricket Australia that they will not be returning at the same time in four years, or most likely ever, for the December 26 and January 3 fixtures.
Relations between the two countries have been pressuretested to breaking point in recent years, with Australia shamelessly cancelling a Test tour in 2021 during Covid-19, weeks before allowing its players to travel to pandemicridden India for the Indian Premier League, and Cricket SA cancelling their three ODIs which were scheduled for after this Test series.
The proliferation of domestic T20 leagues will scythe away many more important and cherished aspects of the game than these fixtures, but Proteas cricketers will be the poorer for it. But that’s progress for you.