On the first day of the third cricket Test between India and Australia at Indore, the way the pitch has behaved, many former cricketers have raised questions about it. In the Test match being played in Indore, the ball is moving as well as keeping low. Statistics don’t show how much the ball is keeping low. In fact, this is the reason why batsmen had to face so much of difficulties. Australian team has batted better than India because after the first session the wicket looked good but in the third session the pitch started showing its magic.
After watching the first day’s play now everyone can speculate in how many days the match will get over. I do lot of criticism for this kind of pitches. Winning and losing matches on such wicket doesn’t matter. For the World Test Championship it is not fair to make this kind of pitch. We have players who can play excellent cricket on any kind of pitch. But they had to struggle on such a pitch. It’s really not an ideal pitch for cricket at all. In Delhi, where the ball was moving up to 2.5 degrees, it rotated up to 2.8 degrees in Nagpur. But in Indore on the very first day the ball on average rotated 4.8 degrees. It is really difficult to play on such a wicket. The pitch on first day actually looked like a third or fourth day pitch.
BCCI should see that we make such wickets which gives boost to test cricket. We need to avoid wickets like Indore. We can’t make such wickets if we expect to reach the final of the championships. Really this matter needs to be taken seriously.
(The writer has been a wicket-keeper batsman and selector of Team India)