Boxing Day Test as it happened: Twenty wickets fall on a wild day of the Ashes

Updated 3 days ago by Caden Helmers

Why we love Boxing Day

Boxing Day is about taking a gamble. Whether it's bowling a bouncer at nan in the backyard, or arriving at the MCG without a front-line spinner for the first time in 15 years.

It's a script ripped straight from a low-budget Australian film.

The unheralded type earns a Boxing Day call-up, looking to emulate the legends he grew up watching. On Boxing Day. At the MCG. In front of a sell-out crowd. Talk about a boyhood dream. It's the kind of thing every cricketer dreams of, from Canberra to Queensland, Melbourne to Maitland, from Broken Hill to the backyard.

Remember Ed Cowan back in 2011? It was almost going to be Todd Murphy this year with Nathan Lyon - second only to Shane Warne on the list of Australia's leading Test wicket-takers - set to miss the showpiece event of the Australian summer. But selectors had other ideas.

This tale is for the ones who stand in the baking sun for hours and don't touch the ball. Stories like this are what make Boxing Day a cricket tragic's real Christmas day.

Some people will never understand. But watching Alex Carey and Travis Head peel off centuries in Adelaide to give Australia an unassailable 3-0 series lead against England was the kind of moment that defines a summer.

And we won't forget this one in a hurry. The worst Australian team in 15 years meets the best England team in 15 years, or so Stuart Broad would have you think. Yet we arrive in Melbourne with the home side three wins clear - just like we have for six of the past seven Ashes series on Australian soil.

Josh Hazlewood will not play a game. Pat Cummins has managed just one. Steve Smith missed out in Adelaide. A 38-year-old Lyon is about to go under the knife, meaning he'll miss the Boxing Day Test for the first time in 15 years. But Mitchell Starc put a nation on his back, the series has been won, and these Ronballers, they're not done yet.

England are in disarray. They arrived in Australia for "the biggest series of our lives", puffing out their chests and confident they could beat what Stuart Broad described as the worst Australian team in 15 years.

It turns out they've been horribly underprepared. They snubbed traditional warm-up games, skipped an opportunity to play a pink-ball game in Canberra and then went on a "stag-do" trip to Noose after going 2-0 down in the series.

It's been a car crash in slow motion of the most epic proportions, especially given England coach Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes have been preparing for this moment for three years.

"If there's things where people are saying that our players went out and drank excessively then of course we'll be looking into that," said England's managing director Rob Key.

"I'm not a drinker. Drinking excessive amounts of alcohol for an international cricket team is not something that I'd expect to see at any stage.

"We've added security. We've got enough ways of finding out exactly what happened. And everything that I've heard so far is that they sat down, had lunch, had dinner and didn't go out late and had the odd drink. I don't mind that."

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Which brings us to Boxing Day. Australia will be without Cummins and Lyon - two of the best bowlers in the world - and selectors have been mulling the final make up of the team.

It looks like they'll go an all-pace attack and Murphy won't become Australia's first front-line tweaker on home soil not named Lyon in more than a decade. The last spinner to play before Lyon on Boxing Day was Nathan Hauritz, 16 years ago.

It's the kind of day that makes you think: "I could dust off the pads again".

You might be one of the ones who could almost be tempted out of retirement at the start of every season. You open your kit bag to find everything just the way you left it, with a bat wedged between pairs of batting and keeping pads to keep the old faithful safe.

You might even have a baggy cap tucked in there. Or maybe it's just a faded trucker hat lined with sweat marks.

You start thinking about coming back. About peeling off scores you've never even gone close to before. After all, former ACT Comet and premiership-winning Tuggeranong great Shane Devoy figures we're only "10 hundreds away from the Aussie team, any of us".

But just as quickly, you zip up the kit bag. That voice came back, didn't it?

Why are we doing this?

Most people don't know the answer to the question, which is why some keep performing that same routine - practicing a shot and packing the bag away again - all summer. But some people don't care.

Forget the 38-degree heat. Forget the lines of a football field, which are carved into the outfield and change the trajectory of a ball in the blink of an eye. You know, the dug-out lines that save a groundsman the hassle of painting them every week in winter.

You might be playing first grade, where you can jag a day off work for a grand final if you're lucky enough. Maybe you're playing sixth grade, where you'll feature more on the Saturday night circuit than you will at training sessions.

You might barely score a run. You might be more accustomed to wides than wickets. You might not even touch the ball. But you keep coming back because there is just something about cricket.