In a glass case on the third floor of the Melbourne Cricket Ground sits a neon pink suit worn by Robbie Williams for his show at the 2022 AFL grand final.<\/b><\/p>\n
The Robster’s performance in front of 100,024 footy fans was seen as a triumph.<\/p>\n
You might not like Robbie Williams. You might think Robbie Williams is the greatest gift to music the world has ever seen. You might take a reasonable stance in the middle, acknowledging Kids is a belting track and Rudebox is awful.<\/p>\n
The point being, entertainment can take many forms. You like what you like. There is no one way to produce music, literature or even Test cricket.<\/p>\n
Test cricket has unrivalled depth. It is hard to think of another sport where the playing is so dependent on conditions.<\/p>\n
The weather, the time of day, the ball \u2013 the list is endless. Most important of all is the pitch.<\/p>\n
If Test cricket is art, the pitch is the canvas on which the players paint their masterpiece.<\/p>\n
The fourth Ashes Test between Australia and England at the MCG was Test cricket cubism, the great game broken apart and stuck back together in abstract form, with a hint of Brydon Carse batting at number three.<\/p>\n
This is not a defence of the pitch which produced England’s first Test win in this country for almost 15 years and the second two-day Test of the series.<\/p>\n
Leaving 10mm of grass on the surface, resulting in 36 wickets falling in less than six sessions, is not a fair contest between bat and ball. Not so much the Boxing Day Test, but the Boxing Days Test.<\/p>\n
But any suggestion this was a diminished spectacle, and one that should historically be marked with an asterisk as not a proper Test, is wide of the mark.<\/p>\n
Test cricket is a rich tapestry, 2,615 parts and counting. Sometimes, like in Melbourne, the ball does all sorts for the seamers, sometimes it turns square on a dust bowl. Sometimes the pitch is flat as a pancake, other times it spits like a cobra. Some matches drag on in interminable tedium, others are over in the blink of an eye.<\/p>\n
This is the understanding we all buy into when we devote time to the game. The thrillers are all the more thrilling because of the investment made elsewhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a glass case on the third floor of the Melbourne Cricket Ground sits a neon pink suit…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":254247,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,13,14,6,11,12,15,16,5,7,8,65,66,67],"class_list":{"0":"post-254246","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-featured-news","11":"tag-featurednews","12":"tag-headlines","13":"tag-latest-news","14":"tag-latestnews","15":"tag-main-news","16":"tag-mainnews","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-top-stories","19":"tag-topstories","20":"tag-world","21":"tag-world-news","22":"tag-worldnews"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115792297572921445","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254246\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/254247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}