Insipid pitch robbed first day of action |
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Thursday March 27, 01:10 AM
Chennai, March 26: For too long it was as quiet as a cathedral. Not because the ICC is trying to put a lid on sledging on the field. Not even because the Chepauk faithfuls were not at their vociferous best since they turned up in lesser numbers than would normally be the case in a cricket-crazy city.
The pitch had such a soporific effect on the Indian bowlers that the ICC cause of clamping down on verbal jousting was already well served in the first Test after the cricket world resolved to stop gladiators from fighting with words and gestures rather than bat and ball.
Curator Kannan Parthasarathy could not produce the regular hard wicket that is associated with the start of Tests at the Chidambaram Stadium. What he is promising — largely because of the weather of the last week and partly because of obvious instructions from Indian cricket authorities — is a possible hat-trick of flat pitches that have marked the most recent Tests in India.
If not for fine innings from the likes of Ganguly, Jaffer and Misbah-ul-Haq the previous two Tests in India, at Kolkata and Bangalore earlier this season, would have been the dullest imaginable. The fate of this Test is far from sealed on a sleepy first day pitch that offered as little as a miser in his least charitable mood. It does, however, appear what Indian cricket is getting wrong is the pitches.
If such an ennui-inducing opening day was possible at all on what used to be the country’s fastest pitch in the 70s, imagine what may lie in store on wickets in the remainder of the series in Ahmedabad and Kanpur where pace in the pitch is rarer than snow in Chennai.
Given the background of the four-Test series in Australia that produced three results and an interesting enough draw, it is hard to ignore the huge contrast in the way cricket is played in different parts of the world. India’s pace bowlers who were bristling with aggression on the sporting pitches Down Under were reduced quickly to appendages at home, to be used at the start of each session and then discarded.
Early on, when the ball was new and the young and energetic opening bowlers Sreesanth and R.P. Singh were bending their backs to make an impression, they were more often left seething with anger when they were routinely dispatched to the boundary. If they were beating the bat at all, it was because of the angles of attack or a bit of swing rather than anything in the pitch.
True pitches may call for accurate bowlers with young legs but dead pitches will lead only to dull cricket in which the batsmen can help themselves to as much as they are willing to work for. It might be a bit early to say that this Test will follow the path of the previous two in India because the pitch is essentially under prepared and will assist spinners with sharper turn as the match wears on.
The lesson learned at the start of this series is that Indian cricket is yet to shed its reliance on the home advantage whereby flat wickets are asked for as a matter of team policy. A bunch of cricketers who could well have earned a draw in Australia if not for the aberrations of Steve Bucknor in Sydney should have been bold enough to ask for a sporting wicket in the first Test.
If not for Kallis, an avaricious gatherer of runs, choosing to walk after an obvious face of the bat contact to short leg via front pad, India would have been staring at a huge South African total. And all because they were not brave enough to ask for a sporting pitch that used to have pace and bounce and good carry at the start before giving way to slow turn.
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