Maher questions MCG pitch

The MCG curator Tony Ware has hosed down speculation that the pitch for the Boxing Day Test might not be up to its usual high standard. Runs were hard to score on a slow Melbourne strip on Wednesday for Victoria's one-day match against Queensland, after similar problems in the Pura Cup clash between the two teams last weekend.

The Queensland captain Jimmy Maher said after the four-day game finished on Monday the pitch was not up to first-class standard and again questioned the surface after Wednesday's game. "If it's going to be like that [for Boxing Day] there's concerns, definitely, but you'd like to think they haven't got it wrong yet for Test cricket," Maher told AAP. "But it's just a grind - it was a grind for four days and it was a grind today, I don't know what it is."

Ware said concerns that the MCG's drop-in pitches were playing too slow should not be extended to include the Boxing day strip, which would not be the one used in the matches against Queensland. "The thing that controls the pace of wickets is basically grass coverage and our grass coverage is pretty good here, not quite as good as what we would normally have this time of year," Ware said.

"But we've got a month to go for that to fill in a little bit more, and that helps us. The Boxing Day strip looks good and we have a little gap [between games] at the moment to do some work on the wickets and get some water into them. We're pretty confident, looking forward to the Boxing Day Test."