Line & Length: Batsmen’s honeymoon may already be over

Team England discovered a ‘Baby Boycott’ but, more importantly, they got their mojo back. The memory of the collapse in one session in Bangladesh has been wiped out, at least temporarily, as in the Jason Bourne series. The current series, appropriately sponsored in these cashless times by an online payment facilitator, has been woken up with sterling performances by the visitors in the first Test in Hameed’s state of origin, Gujarat.

We are so used to Calypso collapses, Kiwi tumbles and Aussie arrogance dissolving in the face of designer spin pitches that we have forgotten what true competition is. We could blame the state of the international game in India on our designer pitches, tailor-made to render the opposition like a teetering house of cards in the path of a tropical high speed fan. Relief has come only now because we have in Gujarat a lover of English cricket who modelled a stadium after Lord’s, including its spaceship-like media box.

More importantly, a pitch with a tinge of green and an un-Indian propensity not to crumble and allow dust to swirl around the batsman’s helmet from, say, lunch on the opening day, was on offer. The English team may have experienced mixed results at Lord’s, but this must have felt like home for them, besides Hameed whose return to his roots must have felt more like a pilgrimage than even Lord’s.  For years we have been saying that good pitches make for good cricket. But then how could Indian cricket be expected to abandon its obsession with Bunsen Burners when a whole fan base and the very business of cricket is predicated upon putting it across all comers to India on spinning dust bowls?

It takes courage or BCCI politics — as we saw once when the Aussies were here in 2005 and the Nagpur pitch sported a green top riling Sourav Ganguly who withdrew from the game ostensibly because of sickness — to make true pitches. Since it’s now the Supreme Court versus the BCCI, there might even be a suspicion that the Lodha committee ordered this. If India had lost it on the final evening, much like England did in the second Test in Bangladesh, then conspiracy theories like the one suggested above would have sprouted dragging the top court into the mundane money politics of BCCI fuelled by officials’ egos as bloated as cricket’s bank balance.

Did the England spinners generally out-bowl their Indian counterparts or was it only because Alastair Cook had the good fortune to win the toss? The toss is all too crucial in India, particularly when they decide to ‘fix’ the pitches because the visiting teams would have even less of a chance if they have to bat second. Sometimes, it might be good fortune to lose the toss in Australia, like say in the current Hobart Test. Out here in India no one would put the opposition in unless it was Rahul Dravid who seemed to have abandoned common sense when he put England in 10 years ago in Mumbai and promptly lost the Test. I doubt such generosity would be featured in this series.

Of course, the batsmen’s honeymoon with a sporting pitch may have been over in this series unless Mohali plays true to old form and produces a firm surface. Given the Indian captain’s views on the subject of grass after the first Test, I doubt the colour would be a highlight of any of the other pitches, certainly not at Visakhapatnam and Chennai, which are capable of laying out pitches that allow the ball to spin like a top. The centuries, of which we saw so many in Rajkot including by the home boy Cheteshwar Pujara, might get harder to make, which is a pity because the awkward pitches ensure another type of ennui altogether in an atmosphere bereft of batting aesthetics.

It should not be forgotten for a moment that the home boy Pujara made a century thanks to India’s newfound faith in the DRS. Coming after the Cook gift of a non-referral when he curiously preferred the advice of his teenaged partner rather than trust his instincts honed in about eight years of the full DRS, this was a dream occurrence. It appeared India had the better of the DRS in its rebirth Test, which is a good development since uniform conditions become possible only if all Tests are played under the same rules.

The conditions on five cloudless days were brilliant and yet we saw a strange phenomenon that both teams shared — the most abysmal catching seen in modern cricket in a long time.

With at least 10 catches going down, was the light to blame or was it the empty stands painted brightly? Even the school children, brought in on special buses, would have understood the importance of fielding and taking catches although they may not have worried too much over it if their heroes were reprieved and they went on to make tons. The Rajkot Test made for good viewing but the fear is there might be some ugly cricket ahead on turners.