Spin set to rule on a 'dry' pitch

The pitch was covered in a thin sheet of slightly wet gunny to keep the intolerable Nagpur heat from bleaching whatever green still remained on the surface ahead of the all-important India-Australia series opener.

The curators, as always, put on quite the show of ‘ensuring an equal contest’ by keeping on a decent layer of grass on Monday, but by Tuesday afternoon, the pitch only had a few green patches to protect. The rest of the strip was but a shade darker than the gunny it was covered in.

The Australians would have known that this was going to be the reception on arrival for the four-Test Border-Gavaskar Trophy Test series starting from February 9. But, now that a spot in the World Test Championship Final is at stake, India have decided to show hostility by stressing on home advantage, and the pitch is usually where that treatment begins.

Australia - with the baggage of not having won a series here since 2004 - largely because of their inability to tackle spin, anticipated this and crammed in as much spin as they could bear since arriving in Alur five days ago.

Since coming to Jamtha, they have remained on a steady diet of spinners, but even Steven Smith couldn’t stop smiling when asked about the pitch. “It’s pretty dry,” he said, still smiling.

The vice-captain was especially concerned with the spot outside the off-stump to left-handers, and Australia have a handful of them so Smith has every reason to worry.

“Particularly one end (pavilion end) that I think will take a bit of spin, particularly the left-arm spinner spinning it back into our left-handers. There’s a section there that’s quite dry. Other than that, I can’t really get a good gauge on it,” Smith said.

“I don’t think there will be a heap of bounce in the wicket. For the seamers, it will be quite skiddy and maybe a bit of up-and-down movement as the game goes on. The cracks felt quite loose,” he added.

Given how the pitch looks already, India are most likely to play three spinners, bringing R Ashwin, Axar Patel and the returning Ravindra Jadeja together.

And two of them - Axar and Jadeja - happen to be rather good at hitting the spots, the ones Smith is worried about, consistently. There’s also the option of Kuldeep Yadav, but his usage at the ‘nets’ suggests India aren’t going in the direction of the left-arm googly bowler.

“Yes, there is the temptation to play three spinners because we’re playing in India,” said KL Rahul. “Yes, we did see it (the pitch), but it’s still too early to really know what the pitch is going to do. We can only look at it and assume it’s going to play a certain way, but you never know with pitches.”

Rahul, who caught sight of the pitch in the morning, is obviously sandbagging the dominant role spin will play on a pitch this dry, and he attempted to distract by making a case for reverse swing playing a big part in days to come.

“It always plays a huge role in India,” he said. “We have seen that historically as well. Any team that has quality fast bowlers who can exploit reverse swing will be dangerous on pitches like this. That’s something that we have tried to prepare for over the last week, ten days.”

Once Rahul left the conference and joined his team for practice, it was mostly about spin again. But a closer look also revealed that India will mostly play Srikar Bharat (he kept for a significant portion of the session) as the ’keeper, while Shubhman Gill (batting with mostly old balls) is likely to be slotted in at No. 5.

And then there was Suryakumar Yadav’s blink-and-you-miss-it stint. Perhaps, his pyrotechnics are going to be reserved for white-ball cricket for a bit longer, or maybe, India aren’t showing all their cards just yet.