Whose home is it anyway?

The “good, five-day wicket” with a lushgreen outfield being swept, mowed and rolled out by the ground staff for the first Test at Mohali is expected to help fast bowlers, initially, and spinners, later on. Is that good news for Team India?

The wicket has “something for everybody”, according to Punjab Cricket Association secretary MP Pandove. What does it really mean? Dayle Steyn hitting the deck hard and getting his guaranteed initial purchase in the event of the Indians being put to bat first, perhaps.

There may not be anything substantial on the Indian first innings scoreboard if Morne Morkel and Kygiso Rabada too harvest their “something”, leaving the sweet job of performing gravity-defying stunts with the bat to AB de Villiers that could take the wind out of the Indian bowlers.

After the T20 and ODI losses, the four-Test series is the last ray of hope for the Indians to redeem the home pride. And to get that job neatly done, what Virat Kohli would need in his home debut as skipper is a square turner. Right from day one, of course.

A sporting wicket that offers fair chances for spinners and fast bowlers, as well as batsmen, may be a beautiful dream being nourished by some curators, but the reality on the ground nowadays is different. Most curators around the world are now rolling out pitches that suit the home team, and in the rare instances when they failed they came forward to even apologise to the home team for their lapses.

A case in point is the first Test between India and England in the 2014 series. After watching Indian opener Murali Vijay scoring a century and MS Dhoni hitting a patient 50 that helped India post 259 for the loss of four wickets at stumps on day one, groundsman Steve Birks apologised for “the Indian pitch” at Notts, making it clear to everyone in the England dressing room that it was a plan that went horribly wrong.

What the ground staff wanted to produce was a pitch with pace, bounce and carry which, said Birks at the end of play on day one, “hasn’t happened unfortunately”.

In the fourth Test of the 2014-2015 India-Australia series played at the Sydney Cricket Ground, curator Tom Parker promised a day before the start of play disgusted Aussie speedsters a pitch that would offer more than what Adelaide, the Gabba or the MCG had offered.

In September this year, James Anderson was too pleased to declare after the Ashes triumph that “we should have done it (doctoring the pitch) more in the past, we should do it more in the future”.

So, why is it that some Indi- an curators try to do their job in a way that hurts the home advantage? The pitch belongs to the curator, that’s a fair call, but he should get the pitch laid out without spraying an awful load of ego onto it.

Indian team director Ravi Shastri’s sarcasm expressed at the South African innings break in the fifth ODI at the Wankhede Stadium was not entirely out of place, and it would have been quite well expressed if he had just stopped at the “great wicket” part of it, without the expletive in Marathi.

That, the expletive, not the sarcasm, was ugly, unwelcome and contrary to the spirit of sarcasm of a high pedigree.

One-day cricket is about runs and more runs, yes, but it’s also about winning, so it’s difficult to understand why the curator couldn’t get a hint of the home need of the day, which was a slow track that offered help to the spinners in the series decider. When curators elsewhere are doing it for the home team, why some Indian ground staff are not getting the point?

If the pitch at Mohali offers twist and turn from day one, it’s funny to term it immoral on the ground that the wicket has been tailor-made for the Indian slow bowlers.

By the same logic, we might as well look at the “unfairness” of unleashing Steyn, Morkel and Rabada on the Indian batsmen when all that India have at the moment are some gentlemen who try to scare De Villiers and Co with back-ofa-length deliveries that travel wide of the target and at a friendly pace of 125kmph.

The fact is that the South Africans have arrived at Mohali with no worries about the nature of the pitch. They expect “big spin” on day one, and they seem to be prepared to deal with the dustbowl. Why are we then putting so much spin on the small matter of taking advantage of the home conditions?

It’s a different matter altogether even if that, the square turner, is not going to reward the Indians with a win at Mohali. The Indian Premier League has helped key South Africans players such as De Villiers, Faf du Plessis, JP Duminy, Steyn, Morkel and Imran Tahir (Wow! That’s almost the entire South African Test team) feel at home on most Indian pitches.

Now, whose home is it anyway?