Australia's Dubai training camp was a wise move

Australia’s Test team is often hampered by horribly poor preparation for Test series, but their recent training camp in Dubai was a wise choice ahead of the series in India today.

In a perfect world Australia would have landed in India a month before the first Test and played three or four highly competitive tour matches against quality Indian opponents on spin-friendly pitches.

But this is impossible given the condensed nature of modern cricket schedules and the cynical behaviour of host nations, which often deny visiting teams the requisite opponents and conditions to prepare properly.

Australia is as guilty as anyone of this practice. Consider the awful Blacktown pitch served up to the Kiwis in their final tour match before last summer’s Test began. Ryan Carters and Aaron Finch put on 503 for the first wicket before New Zealand abandoned the match over concerns about the safety of the rapidly-deteriorating pitch, which was breaking up under foot to a ridiculous extent.

At other times visitors to Australia have been hindered by receiving woefully poor opposition. South Africa’s final tour match last October was against a South Australian second XI littered with cricketers who had never even played first-class cricket. This sometimes cynical deployment of opponents and pitch conditions by host countries is par for the course these days.

Hosts want to catch their poorly prepared opponents on the hop come the first Test. Australia tried to circumvent this situation ahead of the India series by doing the majority of their preparation in the United Arab Emirates. In India, Australia would have been at the mercy of the local curators at whichever grounds they chose for practice. It is very likely the conditions they would have been offered would not have satisfied the Australians.

Instead they decided to take control of their preparation by basing themselves at the ICC academy, which caters its training pitches specifically to the request of visiting teams. The academy has six indoor practice pitches – two designed to be spin-friendly, two which assist fast bowling and two which are batting paradises.

It also has two outdoor grounds, the pitches of which are prepared by the curators based on exactly what the visiting team requires. The curators even have soil on hand from all over the world to help them prepare pitches which match conditions from the different Test-playing nations.

“Depending on the needs of the teams, our pitches are specifically designed for them with either English, Australian or Asian soil,” the academy website explains.

Yet I’ve still read many comments online, including from Roarers, heavily criticising the Australian preparation. I see no issue with Australia experimenting with their training camp in the way they have, particularly when you consider their awful record away from home in recent years. Why not try something different?

When Australia did finally arrive in India they received an unhelpful pitch in their sole warm-up match against India A in Mumbai – unhelpful in that the surface gave more assistance to the Indian pacemen than their spinners, which is the opposite of what is expected from the first Test deck at Pune.

There was so little in that Mumbai pitch for slow bowlers that it took 114 overs in Australia’s first innings until the first wicket fell to spin. When you consider how poorly the Australian batsmen play spin in Asia that tells you a lot about the kind of surface they were offered.

Chances are they would have been given similarly unsuitable pitches in every extra tour game had they held their entire training camp in India. What value would that have offered to Australia? Instead they bypassed the host nation shenanigans that blight modern Test tours and did their own thing.

Good for them.