Earlier this week, we learnt that the ICC were likely to lodge a heavy fine to the Indian cricket board (‘BCCI’), relating to the poor state of the Pune wicket.
There is no doubt that the wicket was doctored to allow for ridiculous amounts of turn from day 1. The fact that they effectively played the Australian spinners into the game was lost on no-one.
However, while the BBCI would seem at long odds to beat this charge, doctored pitches, or at least pitches favouring the home side through local weather conditions, are nothing new. You could argue that this clear home-side advantage is something which is traditional in the game and is one factor as to why it is unique.
Just look at the some of the home ground advantages around the world.
Let’s start with our closest neighbours. New Zealand pitches are the opposite of those produced in India. Your average day 1 pitch in New Zealand has more grass than the average Australian backyard and the great Tony Greig’s “tinge of green” would do them a great dis-service.
The green tops turn Tim Southee and Trent Boult into world beaters. Fortunately, for Australia, our quicks seems to enjoy the conditions as well.
You can add South Africa to the list of green pitch curators and with the likes of Dale Steyn, Vernon Philander and Kagiso Rababa in their team – and you could hardly blame them. It’s no joy for any Test batsman to face these bowlers on a wicket where bounce, seam and swing mould happily together.
England’s pitches are typically less bouncy than South Africa’s but offer plenty of swing especially and also some seam. The Duke cricket ball plays its part as well. Australia’s recent woes in England have largely been down to the swinging ball. But these conditions are nothing new.
Terry Alderman was arguably more effective in England than at home, taking 83 of his 170 Test wickets in England at an average of under 20.
The wickets prepared in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistan (more recently in the UAE) are all largely the same and the dry weather conditions, other than the annual monsoon in the sub continent, clearly play some part.
On the whole, they are all dry, stay low, offer assistance to their world class spinners and the home team simply is better playing on these decks. We will find that India will move back to these pitches for the remainder of this Test series rather than the Pune lunar surface.
The West Indies are probably the outlier in all of this. The great teams of the 80s and 90s were loaded with world class quicks and their attack remains dominated by pace today. However their wickets are low and slow and seemingly not conducive to pace. Pacemen dominating these wickets is probably testament to how good the likes of Michael Holding, Malcolm Marshall and Curtly Ambrose were.
Which brings us finally to Australia. Australia’s pitches tend to offer more bounce than most wickets, which provides Australia with a home advantage. Tours to Australia, with the exception of last year’s South African tour, tend to start at the Gabba where Australian maintains an excellent winning record.
It’s no surprise that this year’s Ashes series will start in Brisbane rather than Perth and the ACB will be hoping Australia go 1-0 up.
The point of this is that all countries prepare pitches to suit their own team. The problem in Pune was that preparing a wicket, that was deteriorating before a ball was bowled, was perhaps a bit too obvious. However, playing under different conditions in different countries is one of the great things about cricket, and lets hope this continues.
qwetzen
Guest
"The point of this is that all countries prepare pitches to suit their own team." My definition of a doctored pitch is; "Where the pitch plays significantly differently from a normal fc game and suits the home side.". The only countries that I've seen do this are India (routinely) and England (recently. Apart from 1956 obviously. And Leeds 1972). And regards Australia in particular, your bald statement quoted above is complete twaddle.
davSA
Guest
I'm going to defend my own country's pitches a little. If overseas sides tour and play at the Wanderers or Centurian for sure expect pace and bounce . But at the same time I have been watching cricket at the Wanderers for 40 years now and it has always been that way ,even for domestic games. St Georges will offer less movement off the seam but consistent line and length will be rewarded and spin will usually play its part. Likewise at Kingsmead and Newlands. They are all wickets which will reward any type of bowling if sufficiently good. All our pitches are conducive to good stroke play. What seriously irritated me was during the recent Sri Lanka series was that all the pitches , St George included were doctored to Green Mamba status. So any moral high ground we may have claimed for fair and sporting tracks was trashed. SA travel so well because of pitch variety locally. This was very short term stuff by the SA suits and they must stop this practice for our own sakes.
John Erichsen
Roar Guru
There needs to be some demarcation between the normal practice of preparing pitches suited to the host team and making significant changes to the pitch to handbrake the visiting team. As you say, in Australia we haven't intentionally doctored our pitches although the modern use of "drop in" pitches seems to be changing the traditional nature of our iconic test wickets, which is a terrible shame. Shallower root systems are one reason I have heard to explain this. Indian pitches have always been low and slow but in recent years they have been well below test standard. Even on the dry Indian wickets, balls shouldn't be exploding through the pitch surface on the first day of a test. Another very clear example of intentional pitch preparation (doctoring) was evident in the 2013 Ashes series, when England backed the spin ability of Graeme Swan as their greatest advantage over our side. Apparently, they couldn't back Anderson, Broad and company to get the job done without aiding our quicks and that wasn't a risk they were prepared to take. Instead of the traditional English seamers, the tests were played on dry, grassless decks. An unusually hot summer was the explanation but Cook even conceded that it was an intentional decision. Anyone with half a brain dismissed the hot summer excuse as our summers are far hotter and we can still get grass growing on our pitches, or at least we could until the 2014 - 2015 summers when we apparently lost the recipe and had lifeless roads instead of cricket pitches.
JamesH
Roar Guru
This pitch is worse than Pune's. At least in Pune the bounce and spin was reasonably consistent. Here we've had a few dozen shooters on day 2 and cracks opening up everywhere from ball one. This pitch should get a 'poor' rating as well. As for England, it was been seam and not swing that undid us in the third and fourth tests of the last Ashes. in both matches, Broad was jagging it around off a deck that looked like it was cut from the outfield. The pitch doesn't have much to do with swing, aside from potentially roughing up the ball a bit quicker if the surface is abrasive. Swing has far more to do with moisture in the air.
Tony Tea
Guest
"The point of this is that ALL COUNTRIES prepare pitches to suit their own team." I disagree. Preparing pitches to suit, doctoring, fixing, etc must take into consideration a significant change of pitch from one match to the next. We don't doctor pitches. We would if, say, Perth went from a 1970s pitch one week to a spinner's paradise the next. But it doesn't, and our pitches in general don't. They pretty much stay the same year on year. India obviously doctor and don't even care that everyone accuses them of fixing. And England are just as bad, turning County batting paradises one week into Test spinner's paradises the next.