Opinion Spicy, for no good reason
As Jharkhand play Karnataka and Bengal play Railways today, the batsmen and pacers will be hoping they luck out on the right ground.
The highest total after three knockout matches at Eden Gardens in this Vijay Hazare Trophy is 242. Railways scored that against Punjab on Wednesday and then won the match by 137 runs, bundling out the opposition for 105 in 33.4 overs. The day before, Bengal could only manage 167, batting first against Tamil Nadu but still won the game by 77 runs. Batsmen have struggled mainly because the Eden Gardens track has clearly helped seam and swing bowlers; chasing under lights was proving to be especially difficult, as the scores indicate.
That is not the whole story. The other quarterfinal match was also held in Kolkata, but at the Jadhavpur University Complex. The batsmen prospered here. Karnataka made 302, with two centuries, and still beat Gujarat only by 27 runs.
The numbers clearly make it a lottery. As a batsman or a pacer, you just hope your team lands the game in the appropriate ground. Robin Uthappa (132*) and Karun Nair (120) cashed in at the Jadhavpur grounds while Mohammed Shami (four-for), Rahul Shukla and Siddharth Kaul (both five-fors) helped themselves at the Gardens.
Or was it just batsmens’ fault that they weren’t able to play the moving ball well at Eden Gardens? If so, then one would have to take in the bowlers’ figures with a pinch of salt. If the batsmen come out looking bad, the bowlers come out looking only slightly better. Staging three matches out of four on such tracks, in the knockout stages of a tournament which is already fighting for significance is just puzzling, at best.
Perhaps the curators were operating on the idea that a spicy track once in a while would not really hurt the batsmen’s numbers, bloated on flat wickets. How overdoing it in a handful of matches at the final stages of a limited overs tournament helps in making the subcontinental batsmen better players of pace bowling remains to be seen. As Jharkhand play Karnataka and Bengal play Railways today, the batsmen and pacers will be hoping they luck out on the right ground.
(Shamik is a principal correspondent, based in Kolkata)
shamik.chakrabarty@expressindia.com
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