POOR PITCH REALLY..?

With the introductions of protective gears and laws that favor batsmen over the years, bowlers have been all but weeded out of the game.

They cannot be banned from the stadium altogether as having a bowling unit is a necessary evil for the game to be played but officials have tried making sure that bowlers are rendered helpless by placing all sorts of restrictions on them. As far as the officials are concerned, bowlers just need to turn up and be smacked all around the park for it to make an interesting encounter. Big scores mean good matches. The phrase ‘balance between bat and ball’ is meaningless to them.

Amidst this stepdaughter treatment at the hands of these guardians of the game, bowlers have always found a way to leave their mark on the game. Tricks like reverse swings and doosra have been developed to bamboozle the batsmen.

But in the last few years, there has been another attack on the bowlers with the introduction of warnings, fines and bans on stadiums for poor pitches by the ICC. The definition of a poor pitch is the one that assists bowlers too much, in essence. Pitches that are totally dead and on which tons of runs are not even blinked at but God forbid if wickets start falling in heaps, eyebrows are raised in an instant. Example of this is the explanation asked for the Galle pitch used for the 1st test between Sri Lanka and Australia by the ICC. It has been called poor.

Although wickets fell in a heap on the 2nd day and bowlers got some help from the pitch but it made for a compelling contest. Fast bowlers, medium pacers and spinners were helped alike and as Hussey, Clarke, Jayawardena and Mathews showed during their endeavors at the wicket that if you were willing to dig in and had the requisite set of skills, you could prosper. It was a pitch that provided a balanced contest. It wasn’t a dustbowl nor was it a featherbed like the Colombo SSC pitch during Sri Lanka-India match last year where both teams ended up making scores in the neighborhood of seven hundred in the first innings leading to a boring draw.

This was a pitch that kept the spectators interested and rewarded the players for their skills, accordingly. Calling it a poor pitch is simply killing the game as I see it.

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