The MCG fixture has become a major part of cricketing folklore but it was a surprisingly recent addition to the calendar
However incompatible they superficially appear, the link between English cricket and Christmas has blossomed since the moment their first travelling team docked in Melbourne on 24 December 1861. But the visitors’ yuletide experience has changed considerably from the days when WG Grace visited in 1873 and spent Christmas Day hunting, unsuccessfully, for kangaroo before enjoying “a good, long, late night”. Or the apparently less enjoyable trip 24 years later when Ted Wainwright, the Yorkshire all-rounder, mournfully informed his teammates over lunch: “I wish I was back in the little cottage turning the meat.”
On the Bodyline tour of 1932-33, Douglas Jardine spent the big day fishing in Tasmania, a turn of events the local tourist board considered so exciting they issued a commemorative postcard. In 1936 the tourists, already away from home for more than three months, celebrated with particular gusto – although “some confessed they would rather be among the snow and sleet of England” than at the team’s Christmas dinner in a private room at Usher’s hotel in Sydney, where “all formality was dropped, and there was much good-natured banter and singing” – being as they were 2-0 up in a five-Test series. They lost the next three.
