Sunday Times

Pitch of a game when it’s not going your way

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● Pitches do strange things to people. Some they turn into sages whose every word is accepted as gospel. Others they cripple with clumsiness. Still others are elevated to the status of minor gods by their relationsh­ip with the 22 yards of grass and clay that are central to the way every match unfolds.

Considerin­g a cricket pitch is rarely what it seems, it’s not difficult to understand why.

In England, particular­ly early in the summer, you can hear the grass growing, mean and green, on every pitch.

In later months an English pitch the colour of straw makes the hearts of batsmen soar and those of bowlers sink. In Asia it takes an experience­d eye to tell the difference between pitches in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, where the clay is, apparently, a darker shade of grey. But they’re all slow and they all turn.

Except at M. Chinnaswam­y stadium in Bangalore, where what looks like the first pitch of an English summer offers an emerald expanse to all who would bat and bowl on it. In West Indies, pitches tend to be cadavers.

As in dead. You will hear that Kensington Oval in Bridgetown, Barbados, harbours “the fastest pitch in the Caribbean”. This is true. But a snail isn’t speedy because it’s the first one to reach the lettuce. The pitch at Sabina

The XI that lost the first test in Galle contained only four of the side that went down to India in Delhi

Park in Kingston, Jamaica, has a disconcert­ing characteri­stic: it shines like a mirror.

You might have noticed that “pitch” and “pitches” appear nine times in the 232 words above this paragraph.

None of those words is “wicket” — which, in the physical sense, is made of wood. It is never made of grass and clay: that’s a pitch.

Add that to the strange things pitches do to people. They turn otherwise easy-going cricket writers into pedants.

The South Africans in Sri Lanka have shown themselves no less susceptibl­e than the rest of us to this dangerous tendency.

The XI that lost the first test in Galle last week contained only four of the side that went down to India in Delhi in the last match of that unhappy, for South Africa, series in November and December 2015.

But they batted as if they were still fighting off the ghosts of a drama — Temba Bavuma described dealing with more fielders near the crease than in the outfield in Delhi as “part of the theatre of test cricket” — in which the Indians bent the rules and convention­s of pitch preparatio­n to ensure the visitors would not add the test series to the one-day and T20 rubbers they had already won.

Galle was nothing like that. It was a Galle pitch, sommer net so.

But South Africa’s batsmen floundered, albeit in the face of fine bowling by the Sri Lankan spinners, to totals of 126 and 73 and, inevitably, a crushing defeat.

The second test in Colombo is into day three as we speak. Somebody needs to tell South Africa they aren’t in India anymore.

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