Time the narrative is turned

Spin-friendly tracks don't ensure success unless you have the requisite skills to exploit the conditions

After India completed a dominant win to level the ongoing four-Test series against England, R Ashwin, the man of the match, asked the Indian cricket community (fans or otherwise) to reflect on its age-old habit of undermining performances of Indian players at home.

“Look, it is us who are getting bothered by all this,” Ashwin countered when asked if was time certain touring teams acknowledged their lack of skills against quality spin on turning tracks. “Everybody is entitled to an opinion, whoever is giving their opinion is totally well within his rights to give an opinion. I think it is us who are reading into it and seeing if it is working or not.

“... So we as a cricketing fraternity or as a country, dealing with such sort of accusations, need to get a little better. We must just hold pride in saying how we are playing good cricket,” he said, indirectly referring to a few former English and Australian cricketers slamming the Chennai pitch for the second Test.

Ashwin is quite expressive; many former spinners have merely silently suffered the indignation while privately expressing anguish at how their success at home is viewed only through the prism of the nature of pitches.

It’s tough being an Indian cricketer. If the team loses away from home, “it’s good only at home”; if it loses at home, “it can’t win even at home”, and if it wins at home, “it’s because of doctored pitches.”

Other terms have been used to describe Indian surfaces - designer tracks, underprepared squares, minefields, dust bowls, Bunsen burners. The latest one is “beach”, unsurprisingly coined by former England skipper Michael Vaughan, who drew an unfair comparison between the Chepauk “turner” and Chennai’s famous Marina Beach.

By now, most followers of Indian cricket bin the trash Vaughan regularly spews in public, but there is a section which constantly holds the Indian team to a higher degree of accountability when it comes to playing surfaces. In this context, it is instructive to note what Faf du Plessis said during India’s tour of South Africa in 2018. The home team had sealed the three-match series in Centurion with a match to go, but then skipper du Plessis wasn’t happy with the pitch as the Indian batsmen and spinners put on a better display than in the first Test played on a grassy Cape Town pitch. The team scores of the Cape Town match were 286, 209, 130 and 135, the home team winning by 72 runs.

Neither the hosts nor the tourists cast any aspersions on the pitch. If anything, India were castigated for going with the wrong personnel for the conditions. With the series already lost, came the third Test in Johannesburg, and efforts were made to stop the match on a pitch where batsmen from either side were getting hit all over. India complained, not about the pitch but about designs to stop the game which they were in with a chance of winning. After all, they had batted uncomplainingly – away from home, lest it should be forgotten -- to set the hosts a challenging target.

When Ashwin said neither the Indian team nor their former players blamed pitches for overseas defeats, he wasn’t off the mark. By doing so, you are only trying to hide your shortcomings against a particular set of challenges. That’s what is unique about cricket, perhaps the most complicated sport.

The course of a cricket match - from the shortest format that lasts just over three hours to the longest that extends to five days - is dictated as much by the skill-sets of players as by extraneous conditions. Even among them, certain aspects can be controlled but there are others that we simply have no say over. Even a light drizzle that stretches beyond five minutes will force suspension of play to ensure the nature of the pitch isn’t altered. That’s quite unlike football and hockey, where play is only halted when the rain is heavy enough for the ball to start floating. Overhead and underfoot conditions don’t have much influence on these disciplines. From the type of the ball used to the nature of the pitch, you then move to the weather - all these factors come together as a symphony to make cricket a demanding but at the same time soothing experience.

Lost in the din of this orchestrated criticism of the pitch is the appreciation of players’ skills -- whether it is batting or bowling. Getting a turner is no guarantee to success. If that was so, then the great Shane Warne wouldn’t have boasted a modest record in nine Test appearances in India. He could claim just 34 sticks at an average of 43.11 and a strike rate of 81 balls per wicket, which compare poorly to a career average of 25.41 and strike rate of 57.

Bowling on tracks offering turn is an art, perfected over years of hard work. To trouble batsmen on such pitches, a bowler should quickly grasp what length will be effective, the speed at which the ball should travel, the amount of revs to be imparted, and the trajectory required to trigger optimum uncertainty. Visiting spinners -- just like Indian pacemen in times gone by upon seeing bounce and carry -- often get carried away by the amount of turn. On such surfaces, turning the ball square is easy but controlling the deviation of the red cherry to induce an edge or rattle the stumps needs a special talent.

The same logic applies to swing and seam bowling. If the ball swings or seams too much, you may look good but it’s not going to fetch you wickets. A batsman is more worried about the one that he has to play at than the one that swings a mile and comfortably beats the outside or inside edge.

Ditto with batting on turners. It’s unfathomable why scoring runs against fast bowlers is considered superior to feasting on spinners. How is Ricky Ponting pulling a Zaheer Khan short ball to the boundary any inferior to VVS Laxman creaming Warne against the turn wide of mid-on? Both require certain skills.

It’s perfectly fine for us to expect Indians to do well on seaming and bouncing tracks, but let’s also celebrate what they are inherently good at -- whether facing up to a turning ball, or delivering one to do so.