Ben Stokes and Steve Smith said on Saturday that a Test match finishing in two days was “not what you want”, adding to criticism of the Melbourne Cricket Ground pitch after the fourth Test between Australia and England ended early.A total of 20 wickets fell on the opening day on Friday, with Australia bowled out for 152 and England dismissed for 110. Another 16 wickets fell on day two, bringing the match to an end within 142 overs as England won by four wickets.“When you go out there and you’re faced with those conditions, you’ve got to crack on and deal with it,” Stokes said after England ended a 15-year wait for a Test win on Australian soil.“But being brutally honest, that’s not really what you want.”“You know, Boxing Day Test match, you don’t want a game finishing in less than two days,” the English captain added. “It’s not ideal, but you can’t change it once you start the game and you’ve just got to play what’s in front of you.”Smith said the pitch had too much grass, which created excessive seam movement and made batting difficult.“It was tricky. No one could really get in. I think when you see 36 wickets across two days, that’s probably too much,” he said.“It probably did a little bit more than they wanted it to. Maybe if we dropped it down to eight millimetres, it would be about right.”Cricket Australia chief executive Todd Greenberg said short Test matches were damaging from a commercial point of view. The Boxing Day match saw the most wickets fall on the first day of an Ashes Test since 1909.The concerns followed the first Test of the series in Perth, where 19 wickets fell on day one and the match also finished in two days, resulting in significant financial losses for Cricket Australia.“A simple phrase I’d use is short Tests are bad for business. I can’t be much more blunt than that,” Greenberg said.“So I would like to see a slightly broader balance between the bat and the ball.”Several former players also criticised the Melbourne pitch. Former England captain Michael Vaughan called it “a joke” on Saturday, adding, “This is selling the game short.” Another former England captain, Alastair Cook, described it as “an unfair contest”.Pitch preparation in Australia is traditionally handled independently by curators, without input from team captains or Cricket Australia. Greenberg, however, indicated that greater oversight may be required.“It’s hard not to get more involved when you see the impact on the sport, especially commercially,” he said.“I’m not suggesting I’ll go around talking to ground staff, but we do have to have a careful eye on what our expectations are over the course of a summer.”
