The Boxing Day Test at the MCG: History and Guide

There is a particular sound the Melbourne Cricket Ground makes on the morning of 26 December, somewhere between the second and third over, when the first genuine appeal goes up and ninety thousand people react at once. It is not a roar exactly. It is closer to weather. You can hear it from Jolimont station, and if you have grown up in this country it tells you, more reliably than any calendar, that summer has properly started.

The Boxing Day Test is the single largest annual event in Australian cricket and one of the biggest in world sport by attendance. It is also, in the form we know it, younger than most people assume.

The basics

Every year, a Test match begins at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on 26 December. Australia are one of the sides. The match runs into the new year period and is followed, usually within a week, by a Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground that starts in early January. The two together form the back half of the Australian Test summer.

Attendance on the opening day regularly runs past seventy thousand and has gone above ninety thousand. No other Test match on earth draws crowds of that size on a routine basis. The nearest equivalents are one-off occasions. This one happens annually, whoever is touring.

Since 2020-21 the player of the match has received the Johnny Mullagh Medal, named for the Aboriginal cricketer who was the outstanding player on the 1868 tour of England by an all-Indigenous Australian side, the first Australian cricket team of any kind to travel overseas. It is a good piece of naming, and long overdue.

Why Melbourne, and why this ground

The MCG has been the home of Australian cricket since before Australia was a country. The Melbourne Cricket Club moved to the current site in 1853, and the ground staged the match now recognised as the first Test in March 1877, when Australia beat England by 45 runs. A hundred years later, in the Centenary Test on the same ground, Australia beat England by 45 runs again. Cricket does not usually oblige like that.

Melbourne's claim rests on three things. It has by far the largest cricket ground in the country, with a capacity a shade over one hundred thousand. It has a public holiday on 26 December in a city that treats sport as a civic activity. And it had the historical primacy to insist on the fixture when the schedule was being carved up.

The ground itself is a bowl, almost circular, with a playing surface so large that the square boundaries are longer than most stadiums are wide. Because the MCG hosts AFL through the winter, the cricket square has been made up of drop-in pitches since the mid-1990s, grown in nurseries and craned into place. That has produced surfaces of wildly varying character over the years, from the flat and lifeless to the genuinely lively, and the ground has been through more than one round of remediation work as a result.

How the fixture became annual

The idea that Melbourne has always hosted a Test starting on Boxing Day is a comfortable myth. It has not.

Melbourne Tests did occasionally begin on 26 December before 1980, and the ground had a long tradition of holding a marquee summer match. But the fixture was not fixed. Some summers the Boxing Day slot was given to a Sheffield Shield match. Some years the Melbourne Test started in early January. During the World Series Cricket split in the late 1970s, the rebel competition ran its own matches over the Christmas period and demonstrated exactly how much appetite existed for cricket in that week.

From the 1980-81 season onwards, the MCG has effectively been guaranteed a Test beginning on Boxing Day, and it is that unbroken run that created the institution. Four decades of continuity is enough to make something feel ancient. It also means the whole tradition is younger than the Sheffield Shield by nearly ninety years.

The crowds

The numbers are the part that people outside Australia struggle to believe.

The record for a day of Test cricket at the ground came on the opening day of the 2013-14 Ashes Test, when just over ninety-one thousand people came through the gates. The 2006-07 Boxing Day Test, in the summer Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath and Justin Langer all retired, drew a first-day crowd close to ninety thousand and gave them exactly what they had come for when Warne took his seven hundredth Test wicket in front of his home city. The 1974-75 Ashes Test drew a reported crowd above seventy-five thousand on the first day at a time when the ground's configuration was very different.

Crowds are not uniform across the five days. The Boxing Day crowd is the enormous one, day two is usually strong, and by day four the ground can look sparse even with thirty thousand in it, because thirty thousand in a hundred-thousand-seat stadium disappears. The COVID-affected 2020-21 match, played against India under a capacity cap of around thirty thousand, was a useful demonstration of that. The cricket was excellent. The ground looked empty.

An Ashes year draws more than a series against a lower-ranked touring side, and the schedule reflects that. But even the quiet years put more people in one place than most sports manage anywhere.

Matches that stuck

1982-83 against England. The finish that Melbourne old-timers still describe shot by shot. Australia, chasing 292, slid to nine wickets down still seventy-odd short. Allan Border, batting with a broken thumb, and Jeff Thomson, batting with the technique of a fast bowler, put on seventy for the last wicket across the end of one day and the start of the next. The MCG opened the gates free on the final morning and eighteen thousand people came in to watch four balls or four hours. Thomson edged Ian Botham, Chris Tavaré parried it at slip, and Geoff Miller ran round to take the rebound. Australia lost by three runs.

1994-95 against England. Shane Warne took a hat-trick, removing Phil DeFreitas, Darren Gough and Devon Malcolm in consecutive balls. Warne's relationship with the MCG crowd was unlike anything else in Australian cricket, and this was the first great demonstration of it.

2010-11 against England. Australia won the toss, batted, and were bowled out for 98 before tea on Boxing Day. England then made 513. It was the day the 2010-11 Ashes was decided, and it was watched by a crowd who had turned up expecting a contest.

2017-18 against England. Alastair Cook batted through most of the match for an unbeaten 244 on a surface so lifeless that the ICC gave the pitch a poor rating. Not a great advertisement, but a significant match in the ground's ongoing pitch saga.

2021-22 against England. Scott Boland, a Victorian, thirty-two years old, playing his first Test at his home ground, took six wickets for seven runs in a spell that ended the match inside three days. He is of Gulidjan descent, and he was awarded the Johnny Mullagh Medal on the ground where Mullagh's side is commemorated. Boland's record is one of the odder ones in Australian cricket, and the story of how a long-serving Shield seamer ends up doing that is really a story about the Sheffield Shield.

2020-21 against India. A restricted crowd, an Australian side that had bowled India out for 36 in the previous Test, and Ajinkya Rahane making 112 to lead an eight-wicket win that turned the series. India went on to win the series from a position that looked hopeless, which is the sort of result that rarely makes it into a tidy summary of Australia's team records.

The pitch, and the argument about it

No single subject has occupied Melbourne cricket administrators more over the last thirty years than the state of the surface. Because the AFL season runs from March to September on the same turf, the Test square cannot be grown in place the way it is at Adelaide Oval or the SCG. The drop-in system solved the scheduling problem and created a cricketing one.

Drop-in pitches at the MCG have historically been slow and low, offering little for the quicks after the first session and less for the spinners at any stage. That produced a run of high-scoring draws through the 2010s and, after the 2017-18 match, a formal poor rating from the ICC. Curators have since reworked the profile with the aim of getting more pace and carry into the surface, and Boxing Day Tests in the years after that were noticeably livelier, occasionally finishing inside three days.

It is a genuine engineering problem rather than a lack of care, and it is worth understanding before joining in the annual complaint. A ground that hosts a hundred thousand football supporters in August cannot also produce a September-grown Test pitch in December.

The ground's other big occasions

The MCG's cricket calendar does not begin and end with Boxing Day. It staged the 1992 World Cup opening match with the Great Southern Stand newly built, hosted the 2015 World Cup final in which Australia beat New Zealand in front of a full house, and held the 2022 men's T20 World Cup final. It also hosted the 1956 Olympic Games and the 2006 Commonwealth Games, which is why the stands have been rebuilt in stages rather than all at once, and why the ground looks like several different decades stitched together.

Where it sits in the summer

The Australian Test summer usually opens in late November or early December, moves through a day-night Test at Adelaide Oval with the pink ball, arrives at Melbourne on Boxing Day, and finishes in Sydney in the first week of January. The exact order changes and the venues rotate depending on the touring side, so treat that as the usual pattern rather than a rule.

What surrounds it matters as much as the cricket. The Sydney to Hobart yacht race starts on Boxing Day. The Big Bash League is in full swing, with the Melbourne Stars and Melbourne Renegades both playing through the same fortnight, and the derby between them is one of the competition's best-attended fixtures at the same ground. Families who would never attend a Shield match go to the Test because it is what you do between Christmas and New Year.

That is the real function of the fixture. It is not primarily a cricket event. It is a public holiday with cricket in it, which is why it survives formats and broadcast deals and generational change without much difficulty.

Going to the match

Tickets go on sale months in advance through Cricket Australia's ticketing partner, and the Boxing Day allocation for an Ashes summer sells fastest. Day-by-day tickets are the norm; you buy for a specific day rather than the match. Prices for day one are the highest and drop for days four and five, which are also the days most likely to be cancelled if the match finishes early. Refund arrangements for unplayed days are set out at purchase, and it is worth reading them.

The Members' Reserve belongs to the Melbourne Cricket Club, and the waiting list for MCC membership is measured in decades rather than years. Everyone else sits in general admission, and the character varies enormously by bay. Bay 13 has a long and only partly deserved reputation. The upper tiers on the northern side offer the best view of the whole ground and the worst view of what the ball is actually doing.

Practical things that matter in a Melbourne December: the weather does whatever it likes, the ground offers no shade in large sections, and the walk in from Richmond or Jolimont station takes longer than you think on the day. Bring a hat, and plan to be there well before eleven o'clock if you want to see the first ball.

The broadcast and radio options, including what is free to air and what sits behind a subscription, are set out in the guide to watching cricket in Australia.

Why it endures

Australia has plenty of big cricket occasions. The Adelaide day-night Test is arguably a better spectacle. The Ashes generates more heat. The BBL reaches more children.

None of them are on 26 December. That is the whole thing. The fixture works because it occupies a date on which most of the country has nowhere else to be, in a city that has organised itself around the ground for a hundred and seventy years, and because the MCG is large enough that the crowd becomes part of the event rather than a backdrop to it. A hundred thousand seats is not a venue. It is an argument.

For the bowlers who have made their names on that ground, see Australia's greatest fast bowlers. For the wider record, start at the cricket in Australia hub or browse the player index.