Australia coach Andrew McDonald rejects talk of made-to-order MCG pitch

“I don’t know how to roll a wicket. I don’t know how to prepare a wicket. Our job is to go out there and solve the problems it presents. So to speculate that we’ve had a say in our wickets over a period of time, I think would be very incorrect.”

McDonald said he was open to CA working more collaboratively with curators on the general issue of pitch production, but no further than that.

“I don’t want to get to a situation if this is where you’re heading where we are asking for specific surfaces and tailor made to what we have at that point in time,” McDonald said.

“I don’t think Australia will ever go there. And I don’t think they’ve ever been there to my knowledge.”

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Les Burdett, CA’s pitch adviser for the past 15 years, told this masthead how he counselled the likes of Page, Damian Hough (Adelaide Oval curator) and David Sandurski (the Gabba) to go about their conversations with coaches and captains.

“You need to listen to the coaches and the captains,” Burdett said. “Don’t get involved in a heated conversation. You need to understand their expectations, and then you need to do the right thing by cricket.”

As reported by this masthead, the second two-day Test of the Ashes summer will cost Australian cricket stakeholders about $25 million and has upset broadcasters, who budget for an average of four days per Test to break even.

McDonald threw his support behind the embattled Page, saying his batters needed to shoulder some of the blame for the summer’s marquee Test lasting just two days.

“How did I think it’d play? I thought we would have got to day three, day four, but the cricket, mixed in with the surface didn’t allow that,” McDonald said. “And we’ve got to take some accountability in the way that we play as well. So it’s not wholly and solely the surface’s fault.”

Formerly the coach of Victoria, McDonald has an intimate appreciation of the problems Page has overcome in turning the MCG pitch from a bowler’s graveyard in 2017 to one that had received top ratings from the ICC for each of the past three Tests.

“He does an outstanding job, and it’s always sort of the perspective that I always use is, we have bad Test matches as well,” McDonald said.

“Sometimes these things can happen, but we support him in what he’s done and really proud of the evolution of the MCG. So hopefully people can have some context around where he’s been on the journey and support him for the next challenge that he faces.”