India captain Rohit Sharma leaves the pitch after Australia won the 3rd Cricket Test match against India in Indore on March 3, 2023. Photo Credit: AP
When a team loses, it is trite to say that the players didn’t want to win out of desperation. For losers, this is both comfort and justification.
Desperation can be a strange quality to seek in sports. It can be inspirational, such as when Anil Kumble, with a broken jaw, bowls in a Test match (and claims the wicket of Brian Lara). It can be frustrating when players manipulate ball position with sandpaper in a win-at-all-costs approach.
India is also starting to show some desperation. Captain Rohit Sharma said at the end of the match Indore Test Which they lost on a turner that these were the kind of wickets India would want to play on at home. More significantly, he said, “It was a collective decision of the team to play on pitches like this.” The implication – that the curator has been instructed to prepare such wickets – cannot be avoided.
not a good ad
The result, a Test that lasted two days and one session, was neither good advertisement for the game, nor fair to the paying public. Of the 19 Tests in India in the last four years, only three have lasted more than five days. Television – a unit that can put pressure on the home team to play wickets that last the distance – lost around 30 playing days in that period.
Nearly a decade ago when MS Dhoni was captain and instructed that a turner should be fielded at Eden Gardens against England, he was told by the then eighty-year-old curator Prabir Mukherjee that it was “unethical”. It was an interesting response, but some curators may have gone against the wishes of the Indian skipper.
India lost that series because England’s spinners made better use of the tracks, while their batsmen, led by Alastair Cook, were less bothered by India’s spinners. This is not the first time that India has fallen into a trap of its own making.
Injustice to fast bowlers
If India insist that they are playing to their strengths in the current series by preparing slow wickets early on and then bringing in fast turners in Indore (the match was shifted from Dharamshala), they could be looking for some good fast bowlers. Disrespecting the form they have produced since that England series. ,
Tired of the team losing pace overseas, the Board of Control for Cricket in India finally gave instructions to leave grass on pitches for domestic tournaments to encourage fast bowling. A whole bunch of fast bowlers emerged. Fast bowlers from top teams were knocking at the doors of international cricket. It was a dramatic turn.
India won Test matches in England and South Africa and consecutive series in Australia. India’s fast bowlers attacked in packs – an idea that existed only in the imaginations of supporters in the 1970s and 80s.
Spin-dominated three-day matches thwart the efforts of a more diverse bowling attack with Jasprit Bumrah, Mohammed Shami, Umesh Yadav, Mohammed Siraj and others winning Tests for India both home and away.
India put a lot of effort and money into finding fast bowlers, bowlers who struggled to make it in the days when the belief was that only spin could win, and prepared wickets accordingly.
regressive
Going back to the days of wickets rotating from the first half hour of the match is now a retrograde step. There cannot be a worse way to discourage young and talented fast bowlers. We can’t go back to the days when spinners were ready to bowl the third over of the match, with token shine-removers being dropped from the attack for the rest of the innings.
Wicket preparation is not an exact science. I have reported the Test where the curator has assured everyone that the medium pacers coming in to take 15 wickets in India’s defeat will only spin the ball from day two! All curators like to be in the good books of the BCCI, and risk their jobs by preparing tracks that don’t help the home bowlers. But this is a short-sighted view. Home advantage is understandable, but the balance to watch is not between the two teams but between bat and ball.
Desperation can be inspiring or depressing. Or shameful, as in the case of the mindset that created the Indore pitch.