Time to look beyond pitch
Rohit Mahajan
Tribune News Service
Mohali, November 4
Finally, it’s time to play. The very public discourse on the pitches in India, and their “doctoring” at the insistence of the Indian team management or captain, should now abate. But if this pitch turns out to be a big turner, it would reinforce the belief that Indians (BCCI or team management) influence the nature of the wickets in India.
And it won’t be news. Everyone does it.
Pakistan are playing England in the UAE, their adopted cricket home, in a Test series. Petro-dollars have the power to produce extremely green, English pitches in that region — in fact, they can and do create even ice there to skate on it. But the pitches there are brownish, not green — it’s so because Pakistan are the hosts there. Pakistan are producing pitches to help themselves, not to help England.
It’s not a secret that pitches are designed to help the home teams. But sometimes, Indians deliberately create pitches that help the visiting teams more, for two reasons — the obstinacy of the local curator, or the politics of the BCCI. In 2004, the pitch for the Nagpur Test against Australia was greenish, more helpful to the visitors. The reason was that VCA president Shashank Manohar wanted to spite BCCI president Jagmohan Dalmiya, an adversary of Manohar’s mentor, Sharad Pawar. Australia won by 342 runs. In November 2005, Sourav Ganguly was not in the Indian ODI team, in the wake of the conflict with Greg Chappell. Cricket Association of Bengal provided a grassy pitch for an ODI, which seemed tailor-made for South Africa. South Africa won by ten wickets. For this game, Mohali curator Daljit Singh says: “Home advantage will be there, it just should be within limits.”
“Limits” is the keyword.
