A cricket memoir: two test matches at the MCG

Frank “Typhoon” Tyson, delivering a thunderbolt during the 1954/5 Ashes

Like most Australians, I am an afficionado of the Boxing Day Test at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (the MCG, usually called simply “The G”). It’s true I have never been to one, being a Western Australian, but I have been watching them on TV for many years, and they rarely disappoint.

The most recent match, however, commencing on December 26^th (Boxing Day) 2025, was a dispiriting affair, and disappointed everyone (with the possible exception of the Barmy Army).   In some ways, it felt like an anti-climax: Australia went into the match 3-up, and the Ashes sealed, having won the infamous two-day Test in Perth (thanks to Travis Head and Mitchell Starc), and then winning convincingly in Brisbane and Adelaide. Approaching the fourth Test at Melbourne, the England team, that had promised so much before the series began, looked to be on the ropes, a 5-nil whitewash beckoning. Other signs were not good: it had been 14 years since the last time England won a Test match in Australia.

But it turned out to be a Test Match travesty. On what can only be described as a “strange” pitch -  a soft green-top in an Australian cricket ground in the middle of an Australian summer, more akin to something cricketers would encounter at Headingly rather than Melbourne -  the English seamers made mincemeat of the Australian batsmen, and England won by four wickets; it was all over in the blink of an eye, in under two days.  Those of us (sated by the frenetics of 20/20 big bashing), who had settled down to watch five days of tense Test Match cricket, with long, patient batting, tactical subtleties and fluctuating fortunes, were cruelly disillusioned.

So instead of watching cricket, I settled back to read a superb new cricket book. This was Victory in Australia – the remarkable story of England’s greatest Ashes triumph 1954-5 by Richard Whitehead. A highlight of that Ashes series was the Melbourne Test, one of the greatest played at that ground – well, you would think so if you are an Englishman, but even a staunch Assie like me was captivated by the drama and the unexpected denouement.

I can still remember it. I was 15 at the time, a high school student in Perth, and a keen sportsman. The Australian cricketers of the day were my heroes. There was no TV (not in our house, anyway) but we listened to the radio and hung on every word from those doyens of the ABC, Alan McGilvray and Johnny Moyes. Moreover, I was used to the fact that Australia always won, especially at home, so this series had a special bite to it. And of all the matches in the series, the Melbourne Test over the New Year holiday was the most compelling.

Backstory

To start at the beginning: England came to Australia in the spring of 1954 holding the Ashes. They had won the 5-match series 1-0 in 1953 in England.  The first four matches in the series had all been drawn, due to a combination of terrible weather and England’s ability to stonewall their way out of trouble, thanks in part to the efforts of Trevor “Barnacle” Bailey, the master of the forward-defensive prod that enabled him to bat all day almost without scoring, and also a master of bowling so wide of leg stump that the Australian batsmen were unable to score, thus denying them victory.  Of Trevor Bailey’s defensive batting Keith Miller later wrote: “When a fielding side sees him coming in, a trough of deep depression immediately settles around the ground”.

But in 1953 England also had the best batsman of both teams in Len Hutton, and the best bowler in Alec Bedser (he was mesmerising on green wickets, and wonderfully consistent; it was said that in the five Tests in 1953, he bowled only one bad ball). Hutton also proved himself a tactically superior captain to Australia’s Lindsay Hassett, while an English summer of constant rain and cold dampened the effectiveness of Hassett’s trump cards, fast bowlers Ray Lindwall and Keith Miller.

Winning the Ashes in 1953 was greeted in England with euphoria (Australia had won every series for the previous 20 years) and was seen as the cream on the cake of a wonderful year –  war-time austerity was coming to an end, 1953 had also seen the coronation of Queen Elizabeth and a British mountaineering team had been the first to conquer Mt Everest.

Within the English cricket world, however, there were rumblings. The appointment of Hutton as England captain had been controversial.  Hutton was a professional cricketer and a Yorkshireman, a dour figure with a “Pudsey” accent. None of this endeared him to the old stuffed shirts in the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) who ran English cricket along class lines. In 1953 those lines were still rigidly drawn between amateurs and professionals in cricket (as they were also in tennis), and while Hutton was a tried and successful captain of Yorkshire, and the country’s premier batsman, he was still a professional who earned his living from cricket, rather than having independent means, as did the amateurs. The Establishment, as epitomized by the MCC, were seriously opposed to a professional, like Hutton, skippering the national side.  In the lead-up to the 1954-55 tour of Australia and New Zealand, there was an unsavory conspiracy to oust Hutton and appoint the young lilywhite amateur Rev David Shepherd as captain in his stead.  Hutton knew about the goings-on and was deeply hurt, and it got into the papers, further undermining his spirits.

One of the greatest stalwarts of the MCC, and the most stuffed of the stuffed shirts was the aristocrat Lord Hawke. He had famously said “Pray God no professional shall ever captain England. We have always had an amateur skipper, and when the day comes when we shall have no more amateurs captaining England it will be a thousand pities”. 

This controversy was still raging when selections for the team to tour Australia for the 1954/5 Ashes series were being considered. In the end, and almost at the last minute, Hutton’s appointment as captain was confirmed. Wiser heads on the selection committee, and outside the MCC, prevailed. However, there were other selection controversies, including the omission of fast bowler “Fiery” Fred Trueman, at that time still fairly new on the scene but very fast and aggressive and likely to do well on Australian wickets. Fred had got into hot water on the 1954 tour of the West Indes (he liked a beer and a party); furthermore, he had been a coal miner before becoming a professional cricketer and was definitely on the wrong side of the class barrier. The selectors decided to discipline Fred by leaving him out of the team for Australia. Also absent from the touring team were England’s two best spin bowlers: Jim Laker and Tony Lock. The selectors did not think Laker would be able to turn the ball in Australia and Lock had been Trueman’s partner in crime in the West Indes - and was also a professional. On the other hand, the selectors did ensure there was a trio of good fast bowlers – Brian Statham, Frank Tyson and Peter Loader. Len Hutton, who had been on two tours of Australia, was in no doubt that success down under would depend on having fast strike bowlers to support Bedser’s seamers. Tyson was the least known, and was to some extent a gamble, only making the team because Trueman had missed out. But Hutton had faced him in a county match and knew he was very fast.

Len Hutton – England captain, opening batsman, and the very model of a modern English professional cricketer

At the same time there were also rumblings over selections in the Australian camp. Hassett retired after the 1953 series and was controversially replaced by the Victorian spinner Ian Johnson whose spin bowling was considered only just up to Test standard.  His leadership credentials were also questioned (most critics believing the job should have gone to Keith Miller who was at that time the inspiring captain of NSW).  Miller and Ray Lindwall were still the spearheads, but both were past their most deadly. On the credit side, there were three new young all-rounders in the side: Richie Benaud, Ron Archer and Alan Davidson. Benaud and Davidson later became famous, but Archer might ultimately have been the best of them, had he not tragically been forced to retire while still a young man because of injury.

The tour gets underway

Under Hutton, the England team set off in September for the voyage (via Ceylon) by boat to Australia. On board, incidentally, was Douglas Jardine, now a member of the press corps but a former England captain and architect of the infamous Bodyline Series. The young Colin Cowdrey, on his first tour, remembers Jardine drawing him aside on the boat deck one day and snarling “Just remember – when you get to Australia you have to hate the bastards”. A match against the local side in Ceylon (these days Sri Lanka) was also notable for Frank Tyson so terrifying the young batsmen of the opposition, that he had to be taken off. One ball, which Tyson dropped short, soared over the keeper’s head and hit the sight screen on the full.

After arrival in Australia, the visitors played several warm-up matches against State and representative sides (the first being against a country XI in Bunbury, where the tourists were impressed by the WA prodigy Barry Shepherd), gradually becoming accustomed to the conditions and finding form. Going into the first Test in Brisbane, however, they had problems: Alec Bedser (their number one bowler), Denis Compton (one of their best batsmen) and Godfrey Evans (the wonderful wicketkeeper) were all unavailable due to injury or illness, although in the end Bedser did play.  Hutton won the toss and put Australia in, and they scored 8/601 (the off-colour Bedser taking 1/131). They then dismissed England twice cheaply and won the match by an innings and 154 runs. But the Australian victory was not without help from England who managed to drop 12 catches during the Australian innings, including that of Arthur Morris on 0, who then went on to make 153.  Their fielding was described by one commentator as “a shambles”.

The second Test, on a good wicket at Sydney, saw England rise from the ashes of Brisbane, and win a magnificent Test Match. Three performances presaged things to come: Peter May, the England vice-captain, made a fine century and the baby-faced Colin Cowdrey batted magnificently to support May in a match-winning partnership.

A rare highlight for Australia in the England first innings: Trevor  “Barnacle” Bailey bowled by Lindwall for a duck. The slips fielders are Ron Archer and Graham Hole

The most significant aspect of the Second Test was that the English tear-away fast bowler Frank Tyson suddenly hit his straps. ‘The Typhoon’, as Tyson was nicknamed, had shortened his run-up, giving him greater control without losing any of his extreme pace. He took 6/85 in the Australian second innings, and England came from behind to win. Of this performance, Johnny Moyes wrote:

Tyson virtually won the game for England in the second over on Wednesday morning. The third ball beat [Australian opener] Burke’s bat, landed near the base of the stumps and the bails went flying. The seventh ball … crashed through Hole’s defense and the middle stump bent back as though to bow the batsman out. It was spectacular, and indeed intensely dynamic bowling by a man who had learned so much since he came to Australia … and one of the lessons learned was that a yorker by a fast bowler can be a shattering event.

Given what was to come in Melbourne, there was another important incident during that match. At a point when Frank Tyson was batting with some confidence (he was a more-than-useful batsman, sometimes coming in at seven), Lindwall felled him with a bouncer. “My God, Lindy, you’ve killed him!” exclaimed Bill Edrich who was batting at the other end. Tyson was knocked out cold (batsmen wore only a cloth cap in those days), concussed and taken to hospital, but he returned to finish the match and, according to one account, he had a strange new look in his eyes when next he took the field. It had nothing to do with concussion, but all to do with revenge.

Frank Tyson is felled by a bouncer from Ray Lindwall, in the Sydney Test

The Third and fateful Test

The scene now moved to Melbourne for the third Test, played from December 31^st, 1954, to January 5^th, 1955. This was one of the most extraordinary matches played between the two countries, replete with controversy about the pitch, appalling weather conditions, superb performances, and a dramatic finale.

As Johnny Moyes later wrote: The Third Test of the series was an amazing affair from every point of view.

Before the match, both captains were concerned about the pitch. The weather that week was vicious – one of those Melbourne heatwaves with a searing northerly wind blowing dust and bushfire smoke into the city from deep in the Australian hinterland. Even before play started the pitch had developed serious cracks. Captains were fearful of losing the toss, batsmen were nervous, bowlers rubbed their hands in glee. Frank Tyson later recalled:

The big question mark of the game was against the lasting qualities of the Melbourne wicket.  In an attempt to quicken up the pitch, the couch grass had been removed, but this not only made the wicket quicker it made it more brittle. …

Cracks are not abnormal in Melbourne cricket pitches. What was abnormal was that the cracks in this wicket were crumbling at the edges even before play began, and nobody doubted that by the third day it would have completely deteriorated, probably making it unplayable.

Hutton won the toss and lost no time in deciding to bat. Nobody wanted to bat last on that wicket.

Lindwall and Miller soon struck, devastating the English batting with balls that hit the cracks and either reared above shoulder height or skidded through below the ankles. At lunch, Miller had figures of 3/5 off nine overs.  But England fought a rearguard action, with Cowdrey batting superbly, and wicketkeeper Evans doing some late swashbuckling. By the time their innings came to an end right on stumps, they were all out for 191.

Australia began their innings on Saturday (New Year’s Day) and were immediately in trouble. Tyson and his partner Statham had both Australian openers out with grubbers that skidded along the ground at ankle height, while Miller got one that leaped off a good length and he was caught at slip.  It was a sorry day for the Australian batsmen, and by about an hour before stumps they were 8/151 and seemingly on the ropes. However, at that point Hutton lifted the pressure and began blatantly to waste time, clearly trying to avoid a late half hour or so batting against Lindwall and Miller. The day tailed off into an almost static stalemate, with the crowd booing and jeering the England players for their palpable time-wasting.  It ended with the Australians on 8/188, only four runs in arrears.

Apart from Hutton’s go-slow tactics, there was renewed focus on the pitch as the day drew to a close. Richie Benaud remembered Neil Harvey saying to him, during their partnership on Saturday afternoon, “I don’t think we’ll be able to play on this on Monday”. Brian Statham recalled that at stumps that day there were wide cracks running all over the wicket, and it was crumbling “to nothing”. Players on both sides expected the match to be all over on Monday (the third match day), batsmen on neither side being capable of handling the conditions.

What followed was a sensation. The next day, Sunday, was a rest day, with no cricket. The pitch had been, as usual, covered overnight, but it was uncovered all Sunday. It was a blistering day, the temperature above 40 degrees, the city was a furnace and the MCG a baking cauldron. A screaming northwesterly seared into Melbourne, bringing dust and smoke from bushfires raging in rural Victoria. The Australian captain Ian Johnson remembered sweltering at home on Sunday afternoon and thinking “God, what’s the wicket going to look like tomorrow morning!”

But to the amazement of everybody, when the wicket was uncovered on Monday morning, the cracks were gone and the surrounds were moist and spongy. The entire centre wicket was now firm and black, where before it had been grey or powdery white. The bowler’s run-ups were squelchy.

At first everyone was mystified. But it later emerged that Jack House, the curator, fearing that “someone was going to be killed on this pitch”, had been observed unspooling a hose on Sunday night and giving the whole pitch and wicket surrounds a thorough soaking. This was flagrantly against the laws of cricket, that unequivocally forbade the watering of a pitch during a match. Despite what was obvious to Blind Nellie, and claims by people who had actually seen him hosing down the pitch, House denied the watering (under oath), claiming improbably that the pitch had “sweated” under the covers overnight. MCG officials supported him.

Astonishingly, they got away with it. The whole thing was hushed up. But the outcome was immediate: when play resumed, the demons of the pitch had been tamed. The last two Australian wickets added 80 runs, and the home team eventually had a lead of 40.

Thanks to the “new, improved’ wicket, the English second innings went well from the start, although before long the Australian bowlers began to make inroads. Then, as in Sydney, the experienced Peter May and debutante Colin Cowdrey came together for a wonderful partnership, the latter displaying batsmanship that awed commentators and crowd alike. Later in the day, with Bailey stonewalling (amidst boos from the crowd) and the spinner Wardle chancing his arm, England were able to make 279, leaving Australia to make 240 in two days in their second innings to win the match. They were well-placed at 2/75 at stumps, with their best batsman Neil Harvey and the promising all-rounder Richie Benaud at the crease.

The Typhoon makes landfall

Tuesday January 4th, 1955, was one of the most memorable in Test match cricket, especially if you are an Englishman. The wicket had lost its demons, but was still tricky, the experts thought the English spinners Wardle and Appleyard would be dangerous … and they all tipped Australia to win.

Ignoring his spinners, Hutton threw the ball to Tyson, and within minutes he had dismissed Neil Harvey (brilliantly caught by wicketkeeper Evans), and then in his third over he bowled Benaud. He was bowling with blistering speed, and almost immediately has another victim, Keith Miller, sensationally caught at slip. The nick rocketed to Hutton at first slip who only just had time to fling out a hand, knocking the ball up in the air; this was then caught by second slip Edrich diving behind Hutton’s back.

Miller, caught (eventually) Edrich bowled Tyson.  “It was the fastest ball I ever bowled” Tyson recalled later

It then became a sorry procession, only two Australian batsmen making double figures. The match was over before lunch, Australia (having started the day at 2/75), were all out for 111, and England won by 128 runs. Frank Tyson took 7/24 in 12 overs, in what was described by the Australian Bill O’Reilly as “One of the greatest Test bowling performances of all time”. Johnny Moyes wrote that Tyson “had speed, life, control and the will to succeed”. 

Later Tyson himself remembered: “I was bowling in a daze … it was if I was watching another bowler. Never before in my life had I bowled like this”, describing what champion tennis players sometimes call as being “in the zone”, an hour or so where every favourable element of high sporting performance suddenly coincides. 

To give an indication of the pace Tyson was generating, Bill Edrich remembered that at one stage, the English slips fielders moved so far back they were closer to the fence than to the pitch, nearly 50 metres from the stumps. In two Test matches, Frank Tyson had gone from being a virtual unknown, playing county cricket for Northamptonshire, to being the fastest and most feared bowler in the world.

A poignant photograph in Richard Whitehead’s book: the almost unknown Frank Tyson waiting to catch a train to join team-mates for the Ashes tour to Australia, nobody to send him off. It was different when he returned six months later, when he was feted as a national hero.

The crumbling of the batsmen against raw pace does not surprise me – I have witnessed this scenario in cricket many times over the years, especially during that period when the West Indes boasted the best and fastest bowlers in the world, and then later when Denis Lillee and Jeff Thomson formed the Australian spearhead.

What most intrigues me was the way the watering of the pitch fiasco did not lead to an independent investigation and an international condemnation of the MCG ground staff and management. It was a blatant contradiction of cricket law and made a mockery of the groundsman profession. But there was no inquiry, no report, no expose in the media, no questions in Parliament.  Perhaps the explanation is that the Australians, including the Australian media, were embarrassed by the affair and keen to see it swept under the carpet, while England and her supporters were just happy to have won the match, especially in such a dramatic and emphatic style.

Johnny Moyes’ guarded conclusion sums it up: I offer no opinion on [the controversy] except to say that the pitch recovered in a most amazing fashion. As to the reason … no comment.

Aftermath

England also won the next match of the series, at Adelaide, to take a 3-1 victory over a demoralised Australian side and retain the Ashes. These were retained again, easily, in England a year later in 1956. Then it was not Frank Tyson, but the spinners Jim Laker and Tony Lock who devastated Australia.

Emphasising how magnificent was the victory in 1954-55, is the fact that it was England’s solitary success in Australia between 1932 and 1971, and England has had only one series win in Australia since 1987. (They lost 4-1 in the recent 2025-26 series). Not only did they win in 1954-5 but they won from behind, coming off a massive loss in the first Test.

What happened to Frank Tyson? While his comrade-in-arms Brian Statham went on to further glory, especially in a future partnership with Fred Trueman, Tyson’s career peaked on that morning in Melbourne. He never again bowled as fast or as effectively, and before long Trueman took over as the main strike bowler for his country. Tyson played only 17 Test Matches, before retiring from cricket to become a schoolteacher (he had a degree in Classics from Durham University) and ended up moving to Australia where he taught at a prestigious school in Melbourne and was a respected cricket commentator on the ABC. He was also an entertaining writer, publishing several first-rate books on cricket and cricket history, replete with quotations from Wordsworth and Shakespeare.

A final reflection

Thinking back on that dramatic Melbourne Test match in the summer of 1954/55, I thought about the recent (2025) debacle at the same ground; again it was England v Australia, again a terrible pitch and again a match that did not go the distance. History, especially sporting history, has a way of repeating itself, not always with glory.

And finally, I treasure the comment by Len Hutton when the Ashes were finally in his hands.  Remembering all the fuss about his appointment as captain, and the antagonism towards him because he was a professional cricketer, he held up the sacred urn and said: “I wish that boogger Hawke were ‘ere to see this!”.

Later when the team returned triumphant to England, the stuffed shirts running English cricket swallowed their pride and gave Hutton a special award in recognition of his successful captaincy in Australia. They gave him an MCC tie. He discovered later it was second-hand.

Postscript: The treatment of Hutton by the MCC echoes a similar story told about the champion tennis player Fred Perry by my brother, in his wonderful book about pro tennis. Perry was an Englishman and (playing as an amateur) a 3-times Wimbledon champion, but he was the son of a Labor MP and from the wrong side of the tracks from the stuffed shirts who ran English tennis. After his first Wimbledon victory , my brother recounted, Perry overheard (from his bath) a Wimbledon official congratulating his defeated opponent, saying “For once, the best man did not win”.  The official left Perry a Wimbledon Club tie, draped over a chair, to mark his victory.  When Perry turned professional, the Club took it back.

References

Kidd, Patrick (2015): Tour de Force. Book review in The Spectator, July 2015

Moyes, A.G (1955): The fight for the Ashes 1954-1955 – a critical account of the English Tour in Australia. Angus and Robertson, Sydney.

Tyson, Frank (1961): A typhoon called Tyson. The Sportsman’s Book Club, London

Underwood, Peter (2016): The pros – the forgotten heroes of tennis. Beyt Noir, Press, Western Australia

Whitehead, Richard (2025): Victory in Australia – the remarkable story of England’s greatest Ashes triumph 1954-55. Bloomsbury Sport, London