Groundsmen primed for turf wars

NEVER trust a groundsman in long pants. Not in the southern hemisphere, anyway. They’re not as close to the pitches they are entrusted with creating as they should be. They talk a decent game, but they couldn’t walk one if they tried. And groundsmanship is all about walking, nothing about talking.

The gentleman groundsman — in my experience they are all men — is a fraud not unlike insurance floggers who say they are selling peace of mind. What they are selling is fear.

What the gentleman groundsman in long pants is selling is the idea that he has dirt under his fingernails and on his mind. Except that his hands are as clean as an accountant’s and his mind is not muddied. He is more interested in projecting a sound image than being sound, and his pitches will betray him as such.

Show me a tanned bloke in shorts who makes it plain that he doesn’t really have the time to natter with the likes of me — but what do I want to know and make it snappy? — and I will show you a groundsman, good and proper.

I’m happy to report that SA is riddled with these ordinary denizens of the game, and thank the gods for that. But even groundsmanship, like everything around it in cricket, is changing.

As one novice of the brethren of mud explained to me years ago, success in the job used to be the preserve of “the few who knew”. Then cricket discovered science, and the alchemy of pitch preparation was exposed for the fakery it was.

If you cut, water and roll, again, again, and again, and a squillion times more for days on end, you will arrive at something like a pitch fit for a game of cricket. Simple.

It is simple, and it isn’t. Pitches are all the same shape and size, but that is all that unites them. At Sabina Park in Kingston, Jamaica, pitch observers sometimes see their faces reflected in the surface itself — a slab of something closer to marble than mud.

At the Wanderers, cracks can become crevices able to accommodate the keys and the car. And you will be charged for parking down there.

There can be enough moisture in the pitch early in an English summer to make batting on it akin to hitting a golf ball bouncing down a cobblestone ally.

It is a well-established fact that, in India, cricket is played on shards of ancient terracotta pottery, ground into dust and sprinkled with cobra venom.

In New Zealand, groundsmen have been known to glue their pitches together to avoid them breaking up. It would be like playing on a massive strip of two-way tape that’s been out in the sun for a day except, in New Zealand, the sun never shines for a whole day.

And then there’s Australia, the dead level centre of the universe. At least, it is if you listen to Aussie batsmen complain about the ball moving off the seam on our awful SA pitches: “You want true batting surfaces, mate. None of this sideways stuff.”

So, you don’t want wickets, a contest, and something worth watching? Maybe not. At least, not while Australia are batting.

During Shane Warne’s career, Australian pitches dried measurably. So they should have. In SA, we aren’t going to run out of fast bowlers soon. And our groundsmen wear shorts. Go figure . . .