‘Pitches for India, Australia series not ideal’

This situation is unfair to the cricket fans who even today prefer to watch their team playing good cricket rather than winning by "Hook or by crook"

By Vijay Mohan Raj

Hyderabad: This is the maxim used by the Government in many of their promotional tourism brochures. If one can imagine a scenario where a guest is invited to your house and as a host you ensure that he is uncomfortable by serving a meal with the intention of making him sick.

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This behaviour is in response to a near similar treatment meted out to you when you visited his home. This is the logic that has been used by some of our former cricket stars who were former coaches and now commentators who use the guise of the caption “home conditions” to justify the atrocious Test match wickets prepared under the supervision of the BCCI and obviously the requirement of the team management.

If you have three five day Test matches completed in three days and justify the pitch condition of play only because the Team India has won two Test matches you are obviously biased in your intention of conducting a Test series that will show case the actual strength of both the competing teams in conditions that are made available of acceptable standards and quality.

In my opinion, the surfaces that were made available in all the matches played in the current India/Australia series 2023 in India that is currently underway in nothing short of being disgraceful. It is also unfair to the players competing specially the batsman who have to depend more on their luck than their skill to contribute to their team’s fortunes.

It also surprises me that there is very little criticism in our media, specially from the Indian experts. They are vary of rubbing the BCCI management on the wrong side lest they are pushed into oblivion in the future by being deprived of assignments in coaching, selection and even commentary which is also now controlled by the BCCI.

I am convinced that if the same situation was faced by a touring Indian team there would have been uproar in the same media and in the ICC official forum by the Indian administrators to the extent of calling off the tour on grounds of unfair play. It is common knowledge that international cricket is now financially dependent on the money generated from Indian cricket.

As a matter of fact the Australians have exhibited remarkable resilience and by winning the third Test in Indore. They have shown superb application and rectified the errors committed in the earlier two Tests.

This they have managed even though they lost the toss and were forced to bat second in both innings. This performance will go down as historic in the manner that it was achieved.

As far as in Indian team is concerned I think it is the best Test team in the international cricket and has no reason to resort to winning matches by tactics of making underprepared rank turners.

This situation is unfair to the cricket fans who even today prefer to watch their team playing good cricket rather than winning by “Hook or by crook”.

At the outset, I hope our selectors write off the poor performances of some of our batsmen and fast bowlers in this series and it shall be a pity if the statistics at the end are used as a yardstick to replace some players with the guise of giving the bench strength an opportunity.

-The writer is a former Mumbai and Hyderabad Ranji player