Cricket News: Flat pitches make for poor Test - When will Cricket board realise?
Test cricket is alive, well, and flourishing. After all, if it wasn’t, how would England score 657 in the first innings of their first Test against Pakistan? And how would Australia score 598-4 declared against West Indies in their first Test?
Flat pitches are unsuitable for Tests.It is quite frankly amazing that teams score these many runs in the first innings of a Test match. However, a closer look at the conditions in place for both games makes a lot more sense.
The answer is simple – road pitches that are incredibly kind to batters and offer next to no assistance to the bowlers.
Fans are conditioned to seeing similar pitches for white-ball cricket – although many would prefer even the surfaces for ODIs and T20Is to offer something to the bowlers.
Yet Test cricket pitches have, for the most part, been reasonably competitive and offered up an even contest between bat and ball.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Shocking pitch for Test cricket .. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/PAKvENG?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#PAKvENG</a></p>— Michael Vaughan (@MichaelVaughan) <a href="https://twitter.com/MichaelVaughan/status/1598617318615138304?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 2, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
But it isn’t the case in both of these Test matches – the pitches have been relatively one note and allowed the batters to wreak havoc.
And this isn’t to take anything away from the batters, either. The Australian and English batters were top drawers, and they deserved the runs they got, given the way they batted.
However, it is much easier to score big runs and daddy hundreds in favourable conditions, as evidenced here.
And perhaps more importantly, it takes away from the idea of Test cricket itself – in the simple fact that it is a test of perseverance.
Can a batsman bat through a spell when the bowlers are breathing fire or getting plenty of swing? Can the batters change their batting style to negate how a Day 4 pitch is behaving as opposed to how the strip was acting on Day 3?
Conversely, can a bowler extract that little something against a batsman in his zone? Will they be able to get the old ball to sing or reverse?
These are the challenges that make Test cricket so great. It is why fans tune in to watch the match and unwind over five days. It is to see a battle, a challenge.
No one is tuning in to watch big hitting in Test matches. Fans have both ODI and T20I cricket to tune in to.
Yet that is what fans are now being treated to in even the most extended game format. There is no scope for bowlers to do anything.
It is telling that Pakistan’s pace bowling line-up, which, even in the absence of Shaheen Shah Afridi, sports an intimidating look, appeared toothless against England’s onslaught.
Similarly, the West Indian bowling looked at a loss as to what could be done to stop the bloodletting. And while their batting is sometimes shaky, their bowling is generally solid.
Yet the contest is dead as soon as the pitch is – which, in this case, was before the ball was even bowled. And the real losers here are fans who tuned in to watch an even contest between bat and ball.