While the Nagpur pitch has already received heavy criticism, Indian captain Rohit Sharma has given an ill-advised advice that ‘the focus should be on the game and not on the pitch’. Players can be selected only by knowing how the pitch is and predicting it. Strategies can be formulated. Does Rohit Sharma not know all this? If Button says something like this in general, the fans who love only Indian cricket fanatically on social media will get likes and receptions like ‘well set’ and super.
But the truth is that everyone is focused on the game, but that requires knowledge of the pitch. Namur KL Rahul said in Bangladesh ‘I don’t know about the pitch, there are pundits inside to predict it’!! How to understand this? A captain, a fielding captain, a fielding captain, a fielding captain, a team-selection captain, a change-of-bowl captain, is Rohit Sharma instructing the Australians in the same way that he says he doesn’t know about the pitch? Then nothing could be more absurd than this. Isn’t it too much to expect Pat Cummins to be the same?
Let us come to the Nagpur Test where the first Test will be held. Does ‘pitch doctoring’ by keeping only one end muddy and dry in favor of left-arm spinners happen anywhere other than Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and India? Don’t say green top right away, we can go and win on green top pitch. But if no team can win for 15 series here, it is not related to ‘talent’, we cannot deceive ourselves and others by saying that it is talent. Certainly pitch doctoring at one or both ends to favor certain spinners has been going on here for a long time.
Due to the threat of Shane Warne once, they left more water in Chennai only where he pitched the ball and continued with the humidity. Because if the place is dry then Shane Warne will empty the Indian team. This has been going on for a long time.
Putting such pitches in a ‘real test’ and making it subjective that the batsmen need patience, skill and skills to play here is nothing but skill talk. India played real spin pitch against England in 2012, but England’s Monty Banesar and Graham Swann used it perfectly to win the Test series in India. It was with this in mind that they did pitch doctoring in the subsequent series. It ended 2 times against India. In the 2017 series, Australia stunned by winning one Test, then lost to Joe Root’s double century on a sloppy Chennai pitch, while India won all the other matches.
Once when Srikanth was pitching director Sachin Tendulkar’s captaincy against South Africa was requested to spin from the first ball, Srikanth said in an interview that Sachin himself made the request. But if what Srikanth said, don’t Sachin, it can be against us’ but Sachin didn’t listen. In the end, South Africa won 2–0 and Sachin relinquished the captaincy. But they are all spin pitches. But the correct view is that ‘pitch doctoring’ is behind India’s failure to win a Test series since 2013.
Now in the Nagpur Test, left-arm spinners Jadeja and Axar Patel came in early, while the real menace of off-spin Ashwin came in the 22nd over. This means that Australia has a lot of left-handed batsmen and that is pre-determined pitch doctoring where one end should be kept dry and ‘rough’ to disable the left-handed batters. This cannot be denied. How can you accept Rohit Sharma saying don’t talk about the pitch, focus on the game when things like this happen?
Twitter user Bharath Sundaresan exposed this on his Twitter page and said, “What is interesting about the pitch preparation in Nagpur is that the middle pitch is well watered and maintained and the length area outside the leg stump of the left hand batters is watered and kept moist. Roller pitching was also pitched and rolled only in the middle pitch. On the other hand, the roller does not go at all in the length areas where the ball is pitched at both ends,” he says. How to understand this? Therefore, the areas where the balls are pitched are deliberately kept dry to defeat the Australian left-arm batsmen. So while criticism should be accepted, ‘focus on the game, not the pitch’ is a wrong approach and a distraction.
ICC cannot interfere in all this. Really need to intervene but can’t because ICC gets 70-75% revenue from India, so ICC will be Mouni.
