Cricket Australia has decided it won’t tighten the reins on how Test pitches are prepared, even after last summer’s pair of two-day finishes left accountants and supporters equally flat-footed.
The issue blew up during the Ashes. Perth and Melbourne wrapped up inside 48 hours and, according to industry estimates, cost CA close to AUD15 million in lost takings. CEO Todd Greenberg summed up the mood at the time, admitting the Boxing Day collapse was “bad for business”.
Yet any move towards a centrally run, one-size-fits-all system has been shelved. Peter Roach, CA’s head of operations, insists local knowledge still trumps corporate oversight.
“It’s inconceivable that we could ever control much more than we do now,” Roach said this week. “In England, you could put in a central curator to go around or New Zealand, or South Africa, because the wickets and the clays and the climates are so similar. In Australia, because they’re so different, you could put the best curator in Australia to a different venue and all of a sudden they’re an also-ran for a while. Because they wouldn’t know the characteristics and the climate and how those pitches respond to that.”
That view is echoed by curators who argue no two Australian grounds behave alike. Perth’s red-hot summers bake the clay; Hobart shivers; Adelaide lives somewhere in between. Asking one travelling groundsman to master the lot, they reckon, is optimistic at best.
CA already employs former Adelaide Oval curator Les Burdett in an advisory role. His brief is simple: help venues produce surfaces that last at least four days and offer genuine contest—results, yes, but not mind-numbing stalemates. Beyond that, curators are largely left to their own devices.
Roach maintains Perth was unfairly dragged into the debate. The ICC rated that wicket “very good”, and Australia’s swift victory was, he feels, down to batting errors rather than rogue soil. Melbourne was a different story altogether: 20 wickets tumbling on day one told its own tale. Even so, CA is backing MCG curator Matt Page to straighten things out in time for New Zealand’s visit next summer, pointing to the more balanced strip he produced in 2024.
“The difference of our pitches across from west to east to north to south is so pronounced and it’s something that we don’t want to change,” Roach added. “We think it’s a really good competitive advantage that we don’t want to make our wickets all too similar like we see in some other countries. Giving curators the chance to explore their unique characteristics is really important. But with that comes a reasonable amount of risk. It does mean that occasionally we go wrong … But I think our history is pretty good in terms of working with venues to improve them.”
Numbers back him up, to a point. Of Australia’s last 20 home Tests, only those two fell off a cliff inside two days; the rest all stretched deep into the fourth afternoon or beyond. Balance, CA believes, isn’t far away—it just needs a little fine-tuning rather than a complete overhaul.
