Green pitches will not benefit England at all

The editor of Cricket Statistician analyses recent events

The Sri Lankans must be wondering why on earth they came to England at this time of year to play cricket, or indeed why anyone does. After two cold, damp “warm-up” games, they were hurled into the bearpit of Headingley under cloudy skies with the ball swinging and seaming like it hasn’t in county matches this year. So an inexperienced side were thrust into wholly unfamiliar conditions and routed. Conclusion – Sri Lanka are rubbish and there’s no point going to see them. Up to a point.

What they have had since they arrived was a draw with Essex on a flat pitch at Chelmsford, where the county scored 412 for four, there was little time for more than one innings each and the Essex bowling was opened by 17-yearold Aaron Beard, on debut, and the Australian Matt Dixon, whose first-class record after the game was 16 wickets at just under 50 runs each.

Then they played Leicestershire (so both matches were against second division county sides playing something short of their first-choice teams).

This game also came nowhere near a result and again on a flat pitch the county scored 375 for five. Leicester’s opening attack was Atif Sheikh (nine first-class matches so far) and Scotland’s Robert Taylor.

All of this was hardly good preparation for Stuart Broad, James Anderson and Steven Finn on a Headingley pitch that was very much a Headingley pitch under grey skies and with the ball swinging and seaming all over the place.

The experience of the last few years seems conclusive: early May is a bad time to play Test matches in England.

In previous years, of course, a touring side might have expected to meet seaming pitches before this, but the changes brought about by the decision to abandon the toss have meant this simply hasn’t happened.

The insistence that you can fit seven Tests and a heap of one-day internationals plus the odd T20 into an English season looks increasingly wrong, even apart from keeping England centrally contracted players well away from their county sides.

Dasun Shanaka’s unexpected success in swinging the ball to knock a hole in England’s batting early on looked good for Sri Lanka, but you could have argued at that point that the writing was on the wall.

I have a book about Indian cricket which insists that cricket must have been invented in India, because England simply doesn’t have a climate suitable for playing cricket in. At times you can see his point.

More generally, nearly all Test series these days are won by the home side except where there is a great discrepancy in class. The sides with spin bowlers produce dusty turning tracks and England green ones.

Probably Australian pitches these days are fairest to the visiting teams, though not many win there.

Pakistan may be stronger than Sri Lanka, though equally unused to English conditions. It would be no help to the game if England spent the summer winning games easily.