India Syndicate 2.0

The South Africans played a wonderful game to take the first test match at Nagpur. They are playing an equally wonderful game to tell the world and anybody else who would listen that they think the Indians will dig up the pitch at Eden Gardens.

If I were the Indian team management, I wouldn’t bother with the pitch. I would just create hype that pitch was going to turn from day one and play three spinners in the eleven. That should do it. The South African batsmen will start treating every delivery as if it pitched on a mine-field.

Not that bad pitches are good for the game, but someone has to ask the question: When teams come touring to India and they end up playing on a horror of a pitch, why is it that they always lose ? At the risk of sounding insane, I believe that it is the same pitch for both sides. There is no way the groundstaff can prepare one pitch for the Indian batsmen and a completely different one for the visitors.

Bad pitches are bad for the game. Period. But the Indian team management is also taking a huge gamble everytime they “ask” for a bad pitch.

Visiting teams need to stop talking about pitches and start talking about why they are not able to adapt to bad pitches. Indian teams have been imploding on swinging and bouncing tracks overseas for decades now. All we hear everytime this happens is that the pitch was the same for both sides and the home team there had adapted better to the conditions then. Why does the same logic not hold when India wins on a “minefield” ?

P.S: A “minefield”  any day is better than a dud that was the Nagpur pitch where for the first two days there was nothing. Was it not for Dale Steyn and Morkel’s pace, that test match would have ended in a horrid draw. Just goes to show that South Africa have the game to crack open a dud match and India do not. At the moment. So, stop fussing over the pitch - both sides. If Ishant Sharma cannot bowl at 145K, and Steyn and Morkel can, that is that. Even on a “minefield”. Especially on a “minefield”.