A diabolical pitch or just a difficult pitch?

Rohit Mahajan

Tribune News Service

Nagpur, November 26

There’s been a wave of criticism of the pitch in Nagpur, from across the cricket world. Former England captain Michael Vaughan has called it diabolical. Matthew Hayden is disappointed that the quality of Test cricket is “reduced to what we are witnessing”. Wasim Akram has called the pitch in Nagpur an “akhara” (wrestling mud-pit) on which the ball “hardly comes on to the bat”. Akram added that either the ICC should get involved in the preparation of the pitches for Test cricket, or start “deducting points that will affect a team’s ranking”.

“Nagpur pitch is BCCI president and ICC chairman’s territory... arguably cleanest cricket administrator,” Bishan Singh Bedi said on twitter.com. “Who decides on conflict of interest here?” Asked to define a “poor pitch”, Vaughan said: “Nagpur, Mohali, Ashes Trent Bridge, Perth last week, Abu Dhabi...”

Nagpur and Mohali, as we’ve seen, have had turning wickets. At Trent Bridge earlier this year, Australia were bowled out for 60 and the match ended in three days. Vaughan cited these as examples of bad pitches due to too much help for the bowlers. He cited Perth as a bad wicket because there was zero help for the bowlers – Australia and New Zealand made a total of 1672 runs on it, for only 28 wickets. There was no possibility of a result. Vaughan, thus, criticised the wickets that had too much help for the bowlers, both spinners and pacers, and also those which had no help for the bowlers.

Sunil Gavaskar, the former India captain, was among those who defended the Nagpur pitch, though he did say that it’s not a “great wicket to bat on”.

“When you come to India, you must be prepared to show patience. You must bend down low and smother the spin,” Gavaskar said. “It’s not a great wicket to bat on, but do not blame this wicket for so many wickets so far. It’s been terrible batting by both teams. They’ve got set and got out. Those who’ve not got set got impatient. World-class batsmen have panicked. They’ve got out in the mind before they’ve got out in the middle. They’ve tried to play different shots, shots they’re not used to. The South Africans have got out in the dressing rooms here, and even in Mohali. That’s what happened to some of the Indian batsmen as well.” Gavaskar said the criticism was coming from cricketers “who do not know how to bat when the pitch starts to do a little bit”.

“The demons are in the batsmen’s minds, they’re not in the surface,” he said.

Why haven’t the South African cricketers or coaches said anything critical about the pitch? Their coach Russell Domingo hinted that they’d focus on playing the game now, and criticising the pitch later. “We won’t criticise the pitch right now,” he said.

“If you’re winning, it is easy to criticise the pitch, but when you’re behind in the series, it is difficult to criticise the pitch,” he said, and added: “If that makes sense.”

Yes, it does make sense – it means that South Africa don’t want to whine and appear as sore losers right in the middle of the series.