Team India’s victory in the Kotla Test was comprehensive. It could be savoured a bit more than the other two in the series as the south Africans resisted mightily, if passively, in playing for a draw to salvage their batting reputation at the tail end of the tour. Also, the Kotla pitch was not the horror that Jamtha near Nagpur proved to be.
A ninth win in 10 home Tests giving the Indians a 90% success rate in the last three years is phenomenal enough to have brought Virat Kohli’s Test team up to no. 2 in the rankings, not far behind the Proteas who had built a proud record of not having lost an away series in nine years. But, before we begin believing in indomitable Indians, a thought must be lent to the type of surfaces laid out earlier in the series.
The BCCI has tried to stave off criticism over the Nagpur pitch termed ‘poor’ by the match referee. In the rebuttal the board is aiming to discrediting the report on technical grounds. But whoever saw the match, at the stadium or on television, would have needed no proof that the pitch was indeed poor. The Indian scorecard in the two innings would have been ample testimony of the kind of surface it was, producing 20 wickets in a day’s play for only the second time since the first ever Test was played on Indian soil nearly 80 years ago.
The Indian formula of designer pitches has long been established, its latest avatar making a regular appearance since K. Parthasarathy tweaked the formula further in making a Chepauk pitch that would play up only beyond the wicket-to-wicket line, thus ensuring that spinners alone could excel while pacers had to aim at the better part of the surface giving the batsmen a chance to counter in defence and in strokeplay.
The one Test Ravi Shastri led India in was also played on a spinning brute of a Chepauk pitch nearly 30 years ago. Narendra Hirwani picked up 16 wickets, leading the batsmen from the Caribbean on a merry dance. Now the Indian team’s director, Shastri was bound to use the memory as well as Indian groundsmen’s expertise in under-preparing pitches. While the West Indies survived the machinations in the phenomenal 1974-75 series after India drew level at 2-2, Viv Richards’ own team was incapable of taking on the spin challenge.
The formula of the ’70s was revived at the time of the Md Azharuddin-Ajit Wadekar partnership when India seemed unbeatable to visitors in the ’90s. Even the strong Australian teams of the time could not defy the conditions to win a series in India in that time and not until the mid Noughties did the Oz conquer the ‘Final Frontier’ — a name coined by Steve Waugh and crossed by Ricky Ponting’s men thanks to the roaring form Adam Gilchrist was then in.
Of course, Sourav Ganguly was not amused by the kind of pitches laid out in the series. The BCCI politics was such in those days that Nagpur laid out a green top to spite Team India and it was believed Ganguly was so incensed that he pulled out of the Test, ostensibly due to a fitness problem. The Proteas were then to conquer the Indian spin frontier too, so too did Alastair Cook’s men in 2012, the last time the Indian spin trick was countered by a visiting team.
The happiness over Virat Kohli’s very young team doing so well as to climb the Test rankings and close in on the leader by winning in Sri Lanka as well as at home should not hide from the discerning the fact that India doctored the pitches to an extent to derive an advantage. On the other hand, the Proteas were beaten even before they walked out to bat. In that sense, they were defeatist and well defeated.
