Inside the 21-minute grilling of the MCG curator Matt Page and his boss after two-day Boxing Day Test

“Obviously we’re disappointed that the Test ended in two days. We didn’t plan for it. We didn’t want it to happen. It’s obviously challenging times for us.”

This was followed by a 21-minute grid on a 20-metre cricket pitch, about the length of the grass. The “disappointing” and “disappointing” events of a 48-hour hurricane were mentioned 25 times, with repeated references to a surface that was a few millimeters too hairy in hindsight.

Thin margins.

“I’m a little flat,” Page admitted. “We’ll learn from this. We’ll get better from this.”

Five days before the match, Page told the Australian Associated Press: “We’ve found a recipe that works here and I think the last couple of years have been really good. We don’t see any reason to change that.”

While Page tuned in to the music, some curious Australian cricket fans, whose tickets had been refunded for the third day, hung around to listen. There were another 90,000 fans across the city with little to do.

It says a lot about Page and Fox that they’re happy to take as many questions as necessary. If an Australian Test star had made a duck, they would never have featured in the post-match press conference. The same goes for the referee if the decision is too harsh.

“We have to take responsibility,” Fox said. “That’s why we stand here today.”

Page, who was appointed MCG curator in 2017 following his tenure at the WACA, said he did not read newspapers or watch the nightly news bulletins. This is probably a good thing. But he didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to know that Friday and Saturday’s events would create backlash.

“I was in a state of shock,” Page said. “I’ve never attended a Test match like this and I hope I never attend a Test match like this again. It was a rollercoaster ride over two days to see it all unfold.”

No other sport relies so much on the length of the grass.

The financial health of Test cricket may depend on the decisions of the curator and his team. If Australia and England’s batsmen had shown a little more tenacity with the willow, Page would not have been at the end of such a controversy. They believed it would be necessary to leave more grass on the field than usual to offset the warmer conditions predicted for later in the match.

Some good news emerged 18 minutes into Sunday’s media conference. Not only did the media offer free fan-favourite pies that would otherwise go uneaten, but it was also announced that the perishable food would be donated to SecondBite, an MCC charity partner that rescues excess food from growers, retailers and manufacturers and distributes it to charities and community groups.

At 9.22am the formalities were completed. Page and Fox walked away with a score of 10 out of 10 for standing out and answering tough questions.

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A few hundred meters away, Australian players began arriving at the fan activation zone, where CA president Todd Greenberg asked them to take an hour to sign autographs and answer questions on stage in front of cricket-absent fans.

Steve Smith’s driving skills and his favorite pizza toppings were among the topics of conversation.

CA’s “Summer Festival fan zone at Yarra Park” featured a ferris wheel, sun loungers next to beach volleyball courts and large screens with the MCG in the background. They had no cricket to show for it.

It was a strange scene: Travis Head was sipping a Gatorade as Greenberg, along with CA president Mike Baird and other executives, greeted the players as they arrived. A British journalist told Greenberg that this would never happen in the UK the day after the Test.

Australian players will seek redemption for the MCG defeat in Sydney starting next Sunday. But Page and his team will have to wait 12 months.