Satire: Much ado about nothing - The pitch debate
In the yesteryears, legends were associated with the grounds that they owned. Their brevity was etched in terms of Honours Boards, Stands, Ends, the Pavilion, and sometimes their names added whenever the ground came up for discussion.
Sehwag played just one Test at Multan, but owned the ground with it. Sachin was unassailable at the Sydney Cricket Ground. McGrath had owned the Lord’s, and Laxman, perhaps entire Australia.
Things have changed now, perhaps to an extent that things are the opposite of what they used to be. Now, it is the grounds that own the players. As illogical as you might find that argument to be, the recent ruckus created around the pitches prepared for Test matches certainly leads one to that observation.
So, while Ashwin picked up 31 wickets in the Freedom Trophy, it wasn’t Ashwin who did it at all. In fact, it was the pitch. Nagpur and Mohali own Ravichandran Ashwin now, as he owes them his wickets.
Rank turners are associated with his five-wicket hauls in a far greater proportion to the revolutions on the ball, and the off-spinner that was earlier missing. Same should go with Stuart Broad who destroyed Australia on a lively Trent Bridge surface, no?
Perhaps players should edit their middle names and insert the ground where they unleashed hell upon their opponents. It would be a fitting tribute to the holy surfaces that helped them do what they did.
What would have they done without those pious stretches of soil?
That way, it would be Stuart ‘Trent Bridge’ Broad, or Ravi ‘Nagpur/Mohali’ Ashwin. Oh, and I haven’t included Delhi here, because it wasn’t a rank-turner. That Ashwin got five wickets there too, was just a fluke.
Pitches, not cricketers, play the game
Roll back a few decades, and you’d remember the West Indies side of the 70s and the 80s travelling the world and beating teams in two-and-a-half days. Thank heavens there wasn’t much coverage of the game, as when Roy Fredricks unleashed hell against Lillee and Thompson on the fastest wicket of the world at the time, there was no one to point out that it was actually a flat deck, and that Fredricks had conspired with the curator.
Same goes with Sachin at Chennai, Lara at Antigua, Ponting and Dravid at Adelaide, and of course, Laxman at Kolkata. There is a reason why 281 is always mentioned along with the Eden Gardens.
It’s a testimony of the ground’s capabilities as much as the batsman’s. That Harbhajan got a hat-trick in the same game was again, magic.
So, how does history remember cricketers? Does it remember the knocks that they played or the surfaces they played them on?
What are the Honours Boards for? Are they for the men who performed at the Lord’s or for Lord’s itself for letting them perform the way they did?
Walsh, Ambrose, Holding, Garner, Roberts all thrived on hard Caribbean wickets, and had they been Indians instead of West Indians, they would have been just another names amongst many of their namesakes.
Had Kumble been a South African, Anderson been a Pakistani, and Steyn been a Bangladeshi, they would have been an engineer, a fashion designer and a photographer respectively.
That they excelled otherwise was due to the pitches, simple!
The first hour of play on a green top would now be dedicated to the top itself, and those at the other end unleashing thunderbolts, can now assemble what’s left of the honours, and revel in the consolidatory glory.
Their pitcher is full finally after 200 years of Test cricket, and the players who dazzled in the ill-gotten fame have to face their Karma. The pitches have now got their rightful place in cricket, and they are meant to stay there.
The pitch is the God in the gentlemen’s game, that even Bradman couldn’t match. The time has come now for all of us to bow down to them, and for the ICC to declare a separate pitches’ rankings.
The competition there would be a spectacle to watch.