Jump to content

 

 

India v England


Recommended Posts

I just watched SA lose 6 for 48 on a flat wicket with even bounce. The great thing about cricket is the ever-changing balance between individual skill and the physical environment of wicket and weather. We could play indoors with robots on identical synthetic wickets but it wouldn’t be cricket. SA now 7-65!

Link to post
Share on other sites

In today's Times, Atherton on the Chennai pitch and pitches.

I tend to agree with him.

A Test Match is, well a "test"; in this instance India passed, England fell short.

India knocked off 600+ runs, with two excellent centuries, and bowled better. 

 

If the pitch had been different, if it was less spin friendly, and if it was more amenable to seam/swing, then.....

the match would have been  in England.

And as we all know, if your auntie had balls, she would not have to identify as your uncle.

 

I would say that

-winning the toss seems even more important on pitches like Chennai, 

-in the 2nd Test, Joe Root did not score heavily, and England lost. 

 

If England had batted first, I suspect that India would have won, anyway, but we would have had a longer match. 

 

Next week, a day/nght game, finishing under lights, so who knows how that will go?

 

 

CRICKET | MIKE ATHERTON

Pitch variety is what makes Test cricket such a great challenge

Mike Atherton

Chief Cricket Correspondent

Wednesday February 17 2021, 5.00pm, The Times

 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/pitch-variety-is-what-makes-test-cricket-such-a-great-challenge-pzxx2z0rf

 

Players spend as much time looking at and discussing pitches as playing on them. In the days leading up to a Test match, it is the talk of the town: whaddya think? How will it play? Does it look a bit green, patchy, bare at the ends? Feels a bit cold, doesn’t it? Damp, maybe? Will it crumble? Heavy roller or light? We prod, stare, deconstruct. Then we ask the groundsman for advice and blame them when it goes wrong.

Grounds have associated legends and peculiar characteristics. The Waca’s “deck of death” in Perth, loved by fast bowlers everywhere; the Lord’s slope; the graveyard that was the Rec in Antigua, home to two world-record individual scores and a great fast bowler for a groundsman. Headingley? “Always look up at the clouds, not down at the pitch” is the dictum for captains at the toss. Red soil at night? Spinners’ delight.

Judging from the comments under the final-day match report from Chennai this week, readers are similarly besotted. No matter that India scored more than 600 runs, and no matter the view of this paper’s correspondent, our readers would not be moved: overwhelmingly, they felt it was an unsuitable pitch. No doubt if allowed, supporters would have gathered around at lunchtime, rows deep, staring at the 22 yards like an ancient heirloom, as they do in England during the summer months.

There is a reason for this infatuation: few sports are as impacted by conditions as cricket. The pitch affects everything. Selection: two spinners, three or none? Four seamers or a balanced side? Strategy: shall we bowl first or last? Defend with our field settings or attack? Catchers in front of the wicket or behind? Conditions, by and large, dictate how players think and operate and as they change from day to day, so must players adapt.

There are, to my mind, only two kinds of unacceptable surface, at either end of the spectrum. One end of it may be represented by the famous photo here of Bosser Martin with his heavy roller, named “Bosser’s Pet”. Mike Selvey, the former England bowler and cricket correspondent of The Guardian, reminded me of this photograph this week, when we were chatting about the pitch in Chennai, and the image is too good not to use.

 

Bosser stands with his trusted roller in front of the scoreboard at the Oval in 1938

 

Bosser stands with his trusted roller in front of the scoreboard at the Oval in 1938

 

Bosser was the groundsman at the Oval in 1938 when, as the scoreboard suggests, England scored a mountain of runs on a pitch with all the life extracted from it. England went on to win the match, but few supporters would want to sit through an innings of 903 these days. Bosser would roll the life out of his pitches and batsmen, such as Len Hutton who made 364, prospered. I played in a version at the Oval in 1990 when Lancashire made 863 in response to Surrey’s 707-9, a shocking match.

 

With fewer alternatives and the game followed in vast numbers, Test cricket could survive a few of Bosser’s graveyards then, even if bowlers couldn’t. Now? Test cricket cannot afford that kind of tedium. The worst pitches for cricket are batting paradises, like Melbourne 2017, where Alastair Cook booked in for bed and breakfast, and Hamilton in 2019, where Joe Root did the same. Say what you like about Chennai, but it produced fascinating cricket.

The other extreme came at Sabina Park, Jamaica, in 1998 when, uniquely, a dangerous pitch caused the Test to be abandoned when I was captain of England. We had our concerns before the start when the groundsman, Charlie Joseph, laid string from end to end and it touched some parts of the pitch, with a two-inch gap elsewhere. The strip was like a corrugated roof, a shiny and hard one at that.

For ten overs or so, we ducked, weaved and got hit. The physio was the busiest man in the ground. Barely an hour old, the cracks in the pitch had already started to open and pucker up, ready to disintegrate. Brian Lara called me on to the field and suggested I talk to the umpires before someone got hurt. It was his first game as West Indies captain and he had just replaced Courtney Walsh, the local hero, so he didn’t feel he could take the initiative. I did so, gladly, and the game was called off.

In between these extremes come the vast majority of pitches. An ideal strip would have a fair balance between bat and ball, one shaded to the bowlers, but perfection is rare in life, people and work. So some veer towards Bosser’s belter, and some towards Charlie’s crevice-and-crater-filled nightmare. Chennai was bowler-friendly, for sure, but it wasn’t dangerous, only challenging. After all, a No 8 scored a century in the second innings.

 

As the writer Kartikeya Date notes on his blog “A Cricketing View”, a pitch that spins is assessed far differently (especially in England) from one that seams. He notes that since 2014, England have been bowled out twice in Tests at home on 21 occasions; on 13 of those occasions in fewer overs than India managed in Chennai and on 17 occasions for fewer runs, yet there has been little comment. He wonders why a spinning pitch is routinely described as a “lottery” and a seaming pitch as “challenging”. His point is well made.

Variety from country to country and ground to ground is the key to Test cricket, and the only rationale for a game to be scheduled for five days is for the conditions to change in that time, offering a wealth of challenges. To enjoy lengthy careers, players know they must succeed in all kinds of conditions — hot, humid, cold and clammy — and on all kinds of pitches — fast, slow, skidding and gripping. Otherwise, the game might as well be played on artificial surfaces, with all the boredom that would entail.

 

Different conditions ask questions of captains and, occasionally, make fools of them. In St Vincent in 1994, we practised the day before a one-day international and, as captain, I looked at the pitch and determined to bat first. Later that day, I went for a walk and met a local on the beach who told me a fantastical story about the tide and the pitch. I can’t say now how much impact that had, if at all, but I changed my mind in the morning and opted to bowl: West Indies made more than 300.

 

In Brisbane in 2002, Nasser Hussain spent the morning of the match fretting about injuries and how to take 20 wickets with a Kookaburra ball on flat pitches. He had noticed the ball swinging in the warm-ups and, looking for something not there, decided to bowl first. Australia made 492; England lost by 384 runs. Half a century before, Hutton had felt like throwing himself in the Brisbane river having done the same thing. What will Ahmedabad have in store, I wonder?

Edited by Uilleam
Link to post
Share on other sites

England’s batting troubles in India and Pakistan are as much due to lack of experience against true spin bowling. I can think of only two mesmerising English spinners, Wardle and Underwood. Laker and Swan were excellent but short of the calibre that India produces in large numbers which I suppose brings us back to pitches.

Link to post
Share on other sites

OOOOPS! 27/2

 

WICKET! Bairstow lbw Axar Patel 0

Despite despairing review. 

Spin works from the very first ball. A ball that turned a nd slipped into the pads in front of middle stump.

Edited by Uilleam
Link to post
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.


×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.