Eden caught between rain, Pujas
KOLKATA: If not for the ball that scuttled him, Virat Kohli looked good to get more than a fifty. If it hadn’t been for the delivery that shot up to take out Shikhar Dhawan’s thumb, maybe he could have concentrated more on saving his career than grimace in pain. Wriddhiman Saha, who has played at Eden Gardens for almost 10 years now, had to take evasive action against a ball that suddenly rose from a crack to almost take out his head. He wasn’t spared in the second innings too.
Yet the India captain said it was ‘a brilliant Test wicket’. “It was a lovely Test match, a brilliant Test wicket. Apart from the variable bounce here and there, it will get better and better,” said Kohli on TV moments after winning the series 2-0. His counterpart Ross Taylor too was far from critical. “To be honest, we thought the pitch would be different. A good cricket wicket, it’s just been re-laid and is going to get better and better,” said Taylor. Even BCCI president Anurag Thakur, during an informal interaction with attending journalists, said that it was a good day of Test match.
Having won the Test, Kohli would have little reason to complain. And generally cricketers refrain from criticising the pitch, for it might be viewed as an excuse for non-performance. But something had gone wrong with this pitch. Eden Gardens has had a history of producing sporting tracks that equally assist bowlers and spinners but batsmen too can produce good innings once they get their eye in. Uneven bounce isn’t an anomaly on Indian pitches but it shouldn’t stretch to extent of surprising batsmen.
Making scapegoats out of the ground staff and curators is the norm in these situations but this isn’t one of those open-and-shut cases. When the schedule of this series was announced on June 28, Eden Gardens had been allotted the third Test, starting October 8, while Indore was supposed to host this Test. Till it dawned on the Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB) that the dates clashed with the Durga Puja. Police protection, as a result, couldn’t be assured at that time.
The CAB couldn’t have pulled out as that would have brought disrepute. So they agreed to hosting the second Test that was to begin on September 30. In its 83-year old Test history, never has Eden Gardens hostedaSeptemberTestbecauseof the monsoon. For the same reason never has the Eden been allotted a Champions League T20 match in September.
Pitch preparation starts only in the first wicket of October. So basically Eden was asked to do the impossible. The weather, as expected, didn’t help. There was hardly adequate sun and the constant threat of rain meant that the pitch was under covers even 48 hours before this Test began. The ingredients of making a good pitch were never at hand.