The unbearable ugliness of the Indian cricket pitches

● “This time I’m not going to be a pushover,” Dean Elgar told reporters in Visakhapatnam on Friday. Elgar? A pushover? In whose warped worldview?

No player anywhere in the game is as relentlessly competitive, as convinced of his cause, as filled with mongrel spirit, as the thumpy, stumpy, grumpy left-hander from Welkom.

If Elgar is a pushover then Cheslin Kolbe is a bumbling tighthead.

And yet all present in Vizag on Friday, and far further afield, knew what Elgar meant.

Four years ago, in his only previous series in India, he had to stick his arm deep down the couch to find 137 runs in seven innings.

Despite the fact that only AB de Villiers made more runs and faced more balls for SA than Elgar in that rubber, his disgust with himself would have put the bathroom mirror in danger of a short, sharp punch every morning as he brushed his teeth.

That’s what India’s pitches can do to even the best of us. They can get into even Elgar’s head and warp his worldview enough to make him think he’s a pushover.

Happily, for the South Africans, the pitch for the first Test of this series has been nowhere near as unfit for cricket as those in Mohali and Nagpur — Delhi was borderline — were the last time around. That’s according to this columnist, not the ICC, who said nothing about Mohali and limply declared Nagpur merely “poor”. Cowards.

Some will cry hypocrisy at this. What about the viciously seaming surfaces teams visiting SA have had to put up with since that 2015 trip to India, apparently in revenge? Was the kryptonite cobblestone alley at the Wanderers for the India Test in January last year any less deplorable than the Mohali monster or the Nagpur nasty?

Yes. And no. You might have been killed facing Morné Morkel or Kagiso Rabada at the Wanderers last year, but you would have died with honour. The bravery of those who batted on that strip of spitefulness will be remembered and revered by all.

Get out to Ravichandran Ashwin in India and you look like a drunk man trying to catch a butterfly using a selfie stick. People laugh at you, and wonder how you manage to get out of bed in the morning without kicking yourself in the face.

Indian pitches are, with not nearly enough exceptions, diabolical affronts to the art of batting. The fact that artists of the crease as great as Sunil Gavaskar, Sachin Tendulkar and now Virat Kohli, among many others, have grown into giants of the game despite the outrageous challenge of having to make their way in India, only confirms their greatness: if you can make it there you can make it anywhere.

Don’t think that’s fair? Ask Elgar.