The Big Story: Surface tensions

“Anil, since the wicket is the hero here, in this series, and very few people know the Chinnaswamy [Stadium] wicket better than you, did you see the pitch and what is your feeling?” This was the first question asked to India head coach Anil Kumble at his press conference on Thursday. It’s a line of questioning he had probably prepared for, given his team’s 333-run drubbing in the Pune Test against Australia last week.

After the match got over in two-and-a-half days, the International Cricket Council branded the Pune pitch “poor”. The Board of Control for Cricket in India was asked to provide an explanation for it within 10 days. For its part, The Maharashtra Cricket Association, whose curator prepared the surface in Pune, claimed that the BCCI had “hijacked the Pune pitch”. Former MCA President and BCCI Secretary Ajay Shirke called it “pitch fixing”.

Just like that, all the goodwill and praise that team India had garnered in this grand home season, which has broadly seen only sporting wickets that allowed the balance between the bat and the ball, was gone in a few days. Before the series with Australia began, India had won eight out of nine Tests this season, and no one seemed concerned about the pitches. But now, after just one defeat on a spin-friendly surface, all the focus was back on the 22 yards.

Why is the BCCI making so much of an effort to meddle with the pitch instead of reposing faith in a team that has done so well in home matches? When India captain Virat Kohli was asked during the Pune test match last week if the team management had demanded a rank turner, he expressed his ignorance. Given the guarded response, it is not clear if the team was taken into confidence about the plans for the pitch.

The BCCI seems to have gone with the assumption that Australia would struggle on a turner. But the Aussies, with their training in Dubai on simulated tracks ahead of the tour, seemed more adapted to such a pitch than India was. Despite its good intentions, the BCCI’s intervention backfired, reiterating the often-repeated advice that the game should be let to take its own course.

When the pitch-related questions did not stop on Thursday, Kumble finally snapped. “Can we move on? It’s only 22 yards. It can’t be very different. We didn’t adapt well, we lost.”

That made sense. For all the talk about the pitch, it is ultimately about how well the players adapt to it. Australia did, even though they were underdogs by a mile. They stuck to the basics, batted smartly, bowled in the right areas, and their catching was exceptional. India didn’t, even though, on paper, the pitch played to their strengths. Their batsmen played poor shots, bowlers got their lengths wrong and fielders were hopeless.

Test matches are won not by the pitch, whether it’s seaming, bouncing or spinning, but by the 22 cricketers who play on it. Whatever Bengaluru coughs up in the second Test starting Saturday, India need to play good cricket to win the match, without worrying too much about how much water was added to the soil.

The Big Scroll

  • What is a good India pitch? Anand Vasu has some answers here. 
  • Why the doctored pitch in Pune spectacularly backfired on India.

Punditry

  1. In this long-form feature in the New York Times, Rollo Romig writes on the devastation caused by river sand mining in India. 
  2. In the Indian Express, Pratap Bhanu Mehta reflects on how our universities have slowly ceased to be liberal spaces. 
  3. In The Hindu, Stanly Johny writes on what the emergence of Stephen Bannon as Donald Trump’s principal strategist means to the world order. 

Don’t miss

Rayan Naqash on why the people of Kashmir are not convinced with claims that the modified shotguns to be used for crowd control by the security forces will reduce casualties.

  “All through, government and other agencies have been claiming that this is a non-lethal weapon and is used only in extreme cases. Later, we were told that personnel who handle these weapons were not trained. What this modified weapon is going to do, only time will tell. But at present, it seems it is only an eyewash.”