WTC reason behind tough pitches: Rahul Dravid

The giant posters, prominently displaying Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese, greet you at the Narendra Modi Stadium which will host the Border-Gavaskar Trophy series decider here from Thursday.

Modi and Albanese will be present on the opening day of the fourth Test and this once again underlines how cricket and politics can't be separated in the country. "75 years of friendship through cricket," says the tagline, highlighting the political dimension of the event.

While Albanese will be rolled out a red carpet, the Australian team knows no such largesse will be extended to them on the field of play. Whether it was by design or coincidence, the local ground staff, in tandem with BCCI curators, had kept two pitches "ready."

Also Read: Ricky Ponting confident Kohli will bounce back, says pitches were a 'nightmare' in ongoing India vs Australia series

While head coach Rahul Dravid clarified they know which surface they were going to play and said he had no idea why there were two tracks covered, it has left Aussies thinking aloud as is evident with reports in their media. Pitch has remained the dominant topic of discussion and debate, rage and ridicule but Dravid defended the nature of the squares for this series despite Indore getting a poor rating by the ICC match referee Chris Broad.

"I won't go too much into it," said Dravid on the referee's report. "The match referee is entitled to make his opinion, share his thoughts on the pitches. Doesn't really matter whether I agree with his readings or not. What I will say is that, sometimes obviously with WTC points at stake, you are looking to play on, sometimes, a wicket that produces or gets results.

"It can happen at times and not only in India and even across the world you are seeing that at times it's difficult to get that balance perfectly right for everyone. And that can happen, not only here but it's happened in other places as well..."

So, if it's happening across the world, is the World Test Championship the reason for such kinds of decks? Dravid answered in the affirmative.

"I don’t know, it could be one of the reasons, because yes, there is a huge premium on results," said Dravid when asked specifically if WTC was forcing host countries to go for overcooked or undercooked wickets. "You draw a game like Kanpur against New Zealand (Nov 2021), where you take nine wickets in the second innings, that sets you back in a home game. So yeah, I certainly think that there’s tough competition all round.

"Every team is getting results at home or are putting in really good performances at home, so there is a premium on results. Whether it’s home or away, there’s certainly a definite premium on getting wins ahead of draws in this competition. You get four points for a draw and you get 12 for a win, so there is a premium on that, there’s no question about it."

With pitches really being challenging for batsmen, Dravid felt that there was a need to reassess what was a good performance. While Dravid and his team-mates stacked up huge amounts of runs on what were largely sporting wickets, the current generation of cricketers haven't been the beneficiaries of this generosity.

"It's really about being realistic about what is a good performance on some of the challenging wickets we are playing on, not only here," he began. "If you look at the last three-four years, all over the world I think wicket has got a lot more challenging, not only here. So you have to be realistic about what the benchmarks are now, what the standards are. Just understanding that in these kinds of games, just one good performance can change the game. We saw that with Rohit's performance, we've seen that many times over here."

"It's just being realistic in our assessment of our batsmen, their averages and their numbers and don't really look so much into it. Just backing our batsmen to understand that these are challenging conditions and they're the same for both sides. And for them to be able to use it as a challenge and an opportunity to do something special. It might not necessarily be about scoring big double hundreds, but you know there might be scores of 50-60 or scores of 60-70 somewhere might be really, really good scores in some conditions."