A lot of factors have been held responsible for India’s massive 333-run loss to Australia in the first Test of the ongoing Border-Gavaskar Trophy in Pune, but foremost among them is the Pune pitch.
While captain Virat Kohli laid the blame solely on the batting order’s collapse, his Australian counterpart Steve Smith said that India ‘prepared a wicket that actually played into’ their hands, and Harbhajan Singh spoke about the need for ‘good wickets’ as well.
Now, another report suggests that it might have been the Indian team management’s insistence that resulted in the much-talked about wicket.
According to a report by the Indian Express, Maharashtra Cricket Association (MCA) has claimed that a week before the Test, the Indian team management made them prepare a dry wicket. The management and a section of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) were said to have “hijacked the Pune pitch”, continues the report.
“When the MCA refused to prepare a rank turner, the senior member of the team management took the issue to the state association curator Pandurang Salgaoncar. When he too resisted, the matter was placed before the BCCI curators (Parsana and Daljit), but even they were a tad reluctant. Then, the BCCI management (not the Committee of Administrators, the cricket board employees) came into the picture. The ground staff had been ordered to remove the grass completely. Things were hijacked from the local curators,” a MCA member was quoted as saying by Indian Express.
The report also spoke about the Pune pitch is traditionally more suited towards seamers due to the kind of soil mixture used, but the wicket for the Test was made to be a ‘rank turner’.
“The Pune pitch has a mixed soil... This pitch requires a little bit of grass and some moisture to last the distance. If you remove the grass completely, it becomes spiteful, while retaining its bounce. But these people were determined to have a completely bald surface,” he says.
Apart from the lack of grass, the wicket is also said to have been parched to make it more spin-friendly.
A report by ESPNCricinfo quoted sources saying that “in the four days leading upto the Test, the pitch got only about half the water it gets before a usual first-class match. Brushes were used to remove the grass and rough the pitch up. Only 2mm grass was left. Information of highs of 37 degrees over the week was readily available on every weather forecast site.”
Numbers show the difference
However, the end result was that Steve O’Keefe, a relatively unknown spinner who Shane Warne believed was the ‘weakest Aussie bowler’, snared 12 wickets, while the Indian spin duo of R Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja got 12 wickets between themselves across both innings. The home team were dismissed for 105 and 107 in the two innings, while the visiting captain, alone, scored 109 in one innings. India’s unbeaten home run stretching back to almost five years was broken.
The numbers say a lot about the Pune wicket’s inclination towards seam. In the Ranji Trophy final between Mumbai and Saurashtra last year, only five overs of spin was bowled. In First Class cricket, seamers average 32 in Pune as opposed to spinners’ average of 63 and in matches with results, the seamers average 28 against spinners’ 59, according to the same ESPNcricinfo story. In the Pune Test, spinners accounted for 31 of the 40 wickets, at an average of about 18.
From 63 to 18, that’s how much of a difference the extra turn in the pitch made. It also showed that if the demand for a rank turner did indeed come from the Indian authorities in order to press the home advantage even more, it spectacularly backfired. The extra turn proved to be a blessing in disguise for someone like O’Keefe, who does not turn the ball as much as India’s spinners do. The extra turn meant that Ashwin and Co were off the mark at times, while O’Keefe just made the most of it.
The pitch debate in Pune means that the rest of the wickets in this series will be put under the scanner. It will be interesting to see how the pitches at Bangalore, and first-time Test venues Ranchi and Dharamsala, play out, especially with the series on the line.