Rohit Sharma has a point but India has too much mud on hands from pitch tinkering

After winning the one-and-half-day Test in Cape Town, Rohit Sharma allowed some righteous anger to kick in. At the press conference after the series was drawn, he expressed the angst that Indian cricketers have lived with for long. Rohit called out those who credited Indian pitches for the team’s incredible home record.

Rohit said that if a Test in India had got over on Day 2, all hell would have broken loose. He wasn’t afraid to point at the ICC’s double standards towards spin and the sub-continent. The Indian skipper made a strong plea: We should be allowed to prepare pitches that suit us and the visiting teams shouldn’t start floating conspiracy theories if it starts turning on the first day. Didn’t the ball jump at batsmen from a good length at Newlands from the first hour?

On the face of it, Rohit sounded convincing, his argument having strength. But was it also fire-proof? Maybe not.

Pitch-making isn’t a tit-for-tat, black-and-white debate; a bit of nuance is needed when discussing this delicate matter. There are several layers of dirt that go into the making of a Test track. Playing on an extra spicy Newlands track without complaining was graceful but that doesn’t give India the right to lay out designer diabolical spin tracks, like they have done in the past.

Rohit’s long pitch monologue at the press conference was like the passionate disposition of a star witness in an intense court drama. “In India on day one, if the pitch starts turning, people start talking about ‘Puff of dust! Puff of dust!’… I think it’s important that we stay neutral everywhere we go,” Rohit said. “Some of these match referees need to keep their eye on how they rate pitches … You stay neutral, and you start rating these kind of pitches (Newlands) also bad, because if you want the ball only to seam and not turn, in my opinion, that is absolutely wrong.”

Rohit was underlining an important point. If the world was fine with the ball taking off from the good length spot at Cape Town, eyebrows shouldn’t be raised when spinners make the ball do the same from similar areas in India.

Point taken, but there is a catch. It is a thin line that separates home advantage from home ‘undue advantage’. A difficult track is one thing, a wicked wicket another. Cricket should remain a test of skills and not a game of fate where your horoscope would decide how long you last on the wicket.

The big factor in the Cape Town Test getting over early was batsmen’s lack of patience and skill needed to tackle bounce. India losing six wickets without adding a single run had less to do with the surface but more about the collective incompetence of the batting group.

Pitch ploys

Natural variation in the surface is fine but engineering cracks isn’t sport. All it takes is a bit of scuffing and a consciously missed watering session; this is enough for a pitch to go from good to bad to ugly. There was a classic case of subtle pitch management witnessed by us – a couple of journalists during the India-South Africa series in 2015. The venue and curator would remain unnamed but this is what happened.

It was a couple of days before the Test. The pitch was dry, the sun was beating down. The South Africans were through with their morning training session but the ground staff was still around. They were waiting for India’s team management to arrive at the ground.

Late in the evening, they did. There was an exchange of pleasantries, followed by an extensive audit of every square centimetre of the area in front of the crease.

India’s Rohit Sharma inspects the wicket during practice on Friday. (Reuters)

There was a long discussion and shaking of heads. Soon a ‘ground hand’ could be seen running to the central square with a ‘coir scrubber’-like object in his hand. The curator would instruct the boy to rub the coir hard on a certain patch around the good length. Days before the toss, the pitch had a distinct wear and tear, the promise of a rough that the spinners could aim at was shaping. That Test was over early, with left-arm spinner Ravindra Jadeja making batting greats Hashim Amla and AB de Villiers look naive. It wasn’t a fair pitch.

These are hush-hush operations and the curators, coaches and captains never speak about them. However, there are rare occasions when the secret is out.

Once in Chennai, veteran curator K Parthasarathy was in a mood to talk. It was 2013 and India had beaten Australia in a tense game. It was a game where Indian spinners had taken 20 wickets but there was no outrage from the Aussies.

Games curators play

Parthasarathy had sold them a lemon. “We started by making the entire pitch firm. After that, we watered it selectively. The areas on either side of the stumps were kept dry, and so turned out to be loose. The line of the stumps was watered and rolled, so it stayed firm through the Test,” he says.

So the Aussie pacers who concentrated on the line of the stumps, hoping that the wear and tear would give them uneven bounce and thus LBW or bowled dismissals, failed. Meanwhile, the Indian spinners happily exploited the rough spots and got loads of wickets.

India’s batter Rohit Sharma celebrates after India won the second Test match against South Africa, at the Newlands Cricket Ground, in Cape Town, South Africa, Thursday, Jan. 4, 2024. (PTI Photo)

This had been done before. In the 1998 India-Australia series, the same curator, by his own admission, had negated Shane Warne by preparing a firm hard patch outside the right-handers’ leg-stump.
“I kept the square patches outside the leg stump, on either side of the wicket, really hard. It was difficult to get turn from that part as there would be no rough there,” he would say proudly.

Over the years, India have loved to fuss over the 22 yards. As recently as the World Cup, coach Rahul Dravid was seen spending hours on the central square days before every game. In the final, the pitch-ploy backfired; on a slow track, Indian batsmen lacked rhythm and Australia took home the Cup.

England will be here this month for five Tests and pitches and curators will be in focus again. What Rohit is saying might be right but it is high time the team that can beat South Africa on a challenging track in Cape Town trusts its players and doesn’t get its hands muddy and soiled over pitch preparation.

Send your feedback to sandydwivedi@gmail.com

Disclaimer: The copyright of this article belongs to the original author. Reposting this article is solely for the purpose of information dissemination and does not constitute any investment advice. If there is any infringement, please contact us immediately. We will make corrections or deletions as necessary. Thank you.