As sporting encounters go, the current Ashes series has not exactly been a display of artistry. Four matches into the five-match series between England and Australia, spectators have been treated to an exhibition of the rapid decline of test cricket into a fast-paced spectacle that lacks the patience, the slow ebbs and flows of momentum, the steadfastness, that makes the long-form version of the game great. Much of the batting has been frail at best and reckless at worst; the bowling – especially from England’s attack – has been inconsistent. England lost the first three tests of the series to give Australia an unassailable lead in just 11 days, which in any other sport would be an eternity but in test cricket is as rapid as can be.
It is another aspect of the modern game, however, that has caught Rakewell’s attention. Criticism of the pitch at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) has led to the surprise rise to fame of Matthew Page, the groundsman – or, as he and many other Australian groundstaff are now known – the ‘pitch curator’. There is no question that preparing a pitch for a test match is an extraordinarily demanding and high-pressured job, but calling groundstaff ‘curators’ feels like a slight overstatement and a stark example of the increasing trend towards euphemistic job titles – the Apple ‘Genius’, for example, or, in another instance of artistic licence (literally), the ‘Sandwich Artists’ who work at Subway. The pitch at the MCG was so unanimously criticised that Page made a post-match media appearance – almost unheard of for groundstaff – where he described himself as being in a ‘state of shock’ at the poor state of the pitch at the MCG. It’s hard to imagine an exhibition curator calling a press conference to justify their curatorial decisions after a bad review in a broadsheet.
Perhaps, though, the term makes more sense than it seems to at first. Curators and groundstaff are both facilitators: they take raw materials – the artworks or the players – and set things up to bring in the crowds and generate as much entertainment as possible. Both professions go somewhat under the radar but have an outsize role to play. And perhaps we shouldn’t baulk at people borrowing from the art world: all press is good press, after all.
