Australia’s cricket community finds itself under scrutiny, facing claims of ‘hypocrisy’ following the controversy surrounding the Boxing Day Test pitch.

Matt Page, the head curator at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG), admitted to the media on Sunday that he and his team made significant errors, resulting in the fourth Ashes Test concluding in just two days.

Cricket enthusiasts and traditionalists were left disappointed as twenty wickets fell on the first day in Melbourne. This marked the shortest Test match at the MCG since Australia played against South Africa in 1932.

The grounds crew had left 10mm of grass on the pitch, creating a challenging environment for batters from both teams. Travis Head’s score of 46 in the second innings stood out as the match’s highest individual score.

Following England’s four-wicket win, the touring captain, Ben Stokes, remarked that there would be an uproar if such pitch conditions had been found elsewhere in the world.

‘Not the best,’ Stokes said when asked what feedback he’d be delivering to match referee Jeff Crowe.

Stokes told BBC Test Match Special: ‘With 36 wickets in less than two days and no total over 200, I think you can read into that a lot.

‘If that was another condition somewhere else and that happened, you probably would get a pasting.’

‘I’m pretty sure if that was somewhere else in the world there’d be hell on,’ he later added.

‘It is not the best thing for games that should be played over five days but we played a type of cricket that ended up getting the job done.’

But many have sided with Stokes’ comments, claiming that the pitches on the subcontinent often receive lots of criticism when many wickets fall in one day. 

English cricket umpire Richard Kettleborough started the discussion on X, noting Stokes’ comments, before writing: ‘Ben Stokes is calling out some hypocrites.

‘What’s your take?’ he added. 

England great Kevin Pietersen also weighed in on the discussion.

‘India always gets hammered when wickets fall like crazy on day one of a Test. And so I hope that Australia gets the same scrutiny! Fair is fair!’ Pietersen wrote.

‘Utter shambles and complete disrespect to the greatest form of the game,’ Pietersen added.

Ex-India cricketer Aakash Chopra concurred with Pietersen. 

Writing on X, he added: ‘Not a single over of spin in 1.5 days of a Test match. Twenty-seven wickets have fallen already. Imagine the meltdown if not a single over of pace was bowled for that long in the subcontinent.’

During Australia’s tour of India back in 2023, the Board of Control for Cricket in India was accused of doctoring pitches to suit the team’s spinners.

It came as Australia were bowled out for 91 in the second innings of the first Test in Nagpur, the Baggy Greens’ lowest ever total in India, with ten players going for lbw.

Another fan wrote on X: ‘What if a Test match ended within two days in India. A huge outrage would be made.’

‘Good to see this from the captain…’ another wrote. ‘It’s these specific English and Aussie pundits and journalists who cry more whenever such results happen in a subcontinent pitch.’

After the match, Nasser Hussain and Michael Atherton both slammed the MCG wicket while speaking on Sky Sports, with the former claiming Victoria cricket icon Shane Warne would have found the MCG pitch ‘unacceptable’.

‘I’m sitting thinking of this great ground and our great friend and you’ve done a piece about him, Shane Warne,’ Hussain told Sky Sports.

‘I don’t think he would have thought that was acceptable.

‘He probably wouldn’t have bowled an over!’ Michael Atherton added, noting how the pitch was set up for Australia’s pace bowlers.

‘He always said if it seems, it spins… but he probably wouldn’t have got on!’

Hussain responded: ‘No, because the seamers were doing so much damage. He would have got on at some stage.

‘But I don’t think it’s acceptable not to have spin at all and having so much movement in the surface.

‘It was farcical at times, and when things are farcical, it is thrilling to watch.

‘But your point is a good one, there are traditionalists in Test match cricket who like the ebbs and flows and the slow build.

‘That was not slow that was cricket in fast forward. And we have enough of that. Whether it be T20, T10, the Hundred, we have that. There will be Big Bash tonight or tomorrow night…

‘This [the MCG] was supposed to have 90,000 fans in every day, and it was supposed to build slowly.

‘That didn’t happen, but what did happen was England finally, after 15 years have the win.’

It comes after the MCG played out a Test match for the ages here last year when Australia snatched a win on day five against India during the Border-Gavaskar series.

The grass had been sitting at around 7mm on the wicket back then, but another 3mm has been left on top of the surface this year, which has caused chaos for batters on both sides.

Matt Page will continue on in his role as Melbourne Cricket Club (MCC) curator, but admitted on Sunday that he was left ‘shocked’ by how the wicket played.

‘We left it longer because we knew we were going to get (hot) weather at the back end that we knew we needed our grass (for).

‘You look back at it and you go, well, it’s favoured the bowlers too much days one and two.

‘If that doesn’t happen, then we set ourselves up really good for day three and four.’

England’s eight-wicket defeat in Perth was the first time in 104 years that a Test match has finished inside two days in Australia.

Now we’ve had two in the space of a month, and Cricket Australia are reeling from the dent that this will put in their coffers, with the losses from Perth setting them back over $5m in revenue.

While the MCC has taken responsibility for the surface that took 36 wickets in a mere 142 overs, Cricket Australia CEO Todd Greenberg has now hinted that the governing body could look to play a greater role in guiding curators to produce pitches of the expected standard.

‘With the way batters are batting, and the way the game is evolving, are the preparation of our wickets in lockstep with that?’ Greenberg said on Sunday.

‘If they’re not, how do we make sure that they are so that we can try to balance the commercial imperatives versus the performance?’

‘Clearly the preparation of wickets has such a material impact on us as a business, and so I don’t think we can just simply sit around without asking some questions of ourselves,’ he added.

‘What that looks like, I’m not sure. Don’t get me wrong – you’re not going to see us on the roller and trying to take over wicket preparation.

‘We’ve been very good in this country at trusting those in each of our stadiums to prepare wickets with characteristics that are unique to each of them.

‘I’m not suggesting we change that, but we want to have a little bit of insight into what we’re about to expect and some of the expectations we will have at our venues. I don’t know exactly how that will play out.’

But there is widespread sympathy for Page, with Aussie batter Travis Head stating on Sunday: ‘I feel for him. It’s bloody tough.

‘You leave 1 or 2mm on with high-quality bowling, you find yourself short, or you take 2 or 3mm with high-quality batting and you leave yourself the other way.

‘Everyone wants to see someone win. Everyone wants to see wickets. No one wants to see a bloke get 300.

‘There needs to be a balance, and sometimes we’re going to see the balance, like last week (the third Test in Adelaide) err to the batters, and some weeks we’re going to see it err to the bowlers.’