Home ground advantage should be exactly that

The wonderful thing about cricket is that there is space for all sorts of conditions – and therefore players – in the game. It used to be true about rugby too, before these days of homogenous 100kg-plus brutes, that anyone could excel in the game, from a five-foot-four scrumhalf to a 130kg prop, from your fleetfooted wing to your beanpole lock.

The different conditions that cricket is played in at the highest level, from the seaming and swinging grounds in England and New Zealand, the hard surfaces in Australia and South Africa that provide pace and bounce, to the low and slow turning pitches of the subcontinent, are all part of the rich tapestry of the sport.

The other side of that diversity though is that home teams get an advantage from playing in conditions that suit them and are foreign to their opponents. Otherwise we would have standardised conditions and cricket would be much the poorer.

The Proteas are not asking for a great deal when they say conditions at home should suit their strengths, especially after the

Ken Borland

pitches imported from the other side of the moon that they had to endure on their last visit to India, which ended in a 3-0 defeat. Those surfaces were so bad, even India’s batsmen could hardly perform on them, with only one player scoring a century in the series, Ajinkya Rahane, who was also the only player to average over 40.

All South Africa want when playing at home is pace and bounce, and other than that maybe a bit of lateral movement and no obvious turn.

Which is why, after such a promising start to the series in Cape Town, the second Test at Centurion was something of a disappointment, despite South Africa’s stirring victory in conditions that certainly suited India more than them.

Once the new ball lost its hardness, there was very little for the pace bowlers to work with and the slowness of the pitch meant even batsmen and spinners had to work hard for any success. There were too many periods of play when, instead of being a decent contest between bat and ball, the match seemed to be at a stalemate.

I have sympathy though for groundsman Bryan Bloy because he is just starting out on his career when it comes to cricket pitch preparation, a difficult and inexact science. Perhaps, as Faf du Plessis suggested after the game, Cricket South Africa should have given him more support?