Not fingers of their spinners, India’s fate was sealed by soiled hands of curator

Be it the Day 5 ‘James Anderson c Tom Blundell b Neil Wagner’ end to the riveting New Zealand-England Test or the 50s archival video tour diary at the museum, Indian cricket ostensibly has no connection to Wellington.

For starters, the pitch at Basin Reserve, unlike the ones laid out in the ongoing India-Australia series, was accommodative to cricketers of all hue and skill. Pacers had the lion’s share but English spinner Jack Leech did end with a fiver. There were three tons – two from visitors, one from hosts – including a daddy hundred by rookie English batsman Harry Brooks.

In contrast, in the India-Australia Test at Indore, the highest was a laboured 60 by Usman Khwaja. Spinners dominated games and Mohammad Siraj bowled 6 overs in the entire Test – just two more than he bowled in a T20 game. Partisan to spinners, Indian pitches can make batsmen feel unfairly insecure and pacer contemplate career-switch. It’s no surprise, ICC called this ‘non-inclusive’ pitch poor.

Despite India’s success on tough and hard Australia wickets, Rohit Sharma and Rahul Dravid don’t trust their team even on spin-friendly but sporting pitches. They surely don’t endorse England’s Kiwi coach Brendon McCullum’s enterprising new-age derring-do brand of cricket.

Unlike the nation they represent, they haven’t moved with the times. India in the last couple of decades has changed beyond recognition. The Maharaja’s rule is long over and it is no longer the kind of place Ian Botham would prefer to send his mother-in-law for holiday. India now is actually the most-sought after work-place for most English and Australian former cricketers.

The giant strides by the country’s hospitality industry now give foreign teams a home away from home feel. The stadiums are modern and outfields lush. The mystery has faded and the Indian Premier League has ensured that India is the second home for the world’s top cricketers.

As a collateral, while the country was rapidly transforming, Indian cricket’s mysterious layers were getting periodically peeled. The off-the-field global standard of comfort and increased knowledge of the local conditions would diminish India’s overall home advantage on the central square. Foreign players were getting a closer look at the fingers of Indian spinners and spotting the Achilles heel of the batsmen. Familiarity had bred comfort.

But for the 22-yard patch on which Tests are played, everything else is declassified in Indian cricket now. Since the IPL is mostly played on well-rolled firm batsmen-friendly tracks, the nature of Indian Test pitches remain the only subject of intrigue for the visitors. The old crumpled magical brown carpet was the only exotica that baffled the tourists.

Does that mean that India is indulging in unfair practice by opting for spin-friendly tracks for home games? On face value, this didn’t amount to breaking any cricketing law. The richness of Test cricket’s narrative is the diverse nature of the surfaces it is played on. On this issue, a parallel to tennis can be made.

Staying clear of globalisation’s big sweeping brush of homogeneity, cricket and tennis have retained their rainbow hue. Like the uniquely different Grand Slams, cricket too has shunned the monopoly of a single surface. If Australia is cricket’s hard court, England is grass and the sub-continent a giant clay court spread across four nations – India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. And like the US hard court circuits and the pre-Wimbledon Queens, cricket also has other Majors in South Africa and New Zealand. So far so good. That’s where the two sports part ways.

But for the out-of-fashion Davis Cup, cricket’s staple ‘the home advantage’ has no place at Grand Slams. Court-tampering conspiracy theories to help a local or a full-house ensuring champion aren’t the kind of stories media reports during the Slams. No one has heard of a Wimbledon curator being blamed for leaving extra grass on one side of the Centre Court for Andy Murray to make his double-handed backhand down the line pass fly.

That’s where India cricket can take a leaf out of the tennis book. Tennis too has surface-specific specialists but it also guarantees a level-playing field for everyone. Rafael Nadal’s game is suited for clay, Roger Federer loved grass and Novak Djokovic is a hard-court master but they don’t have an extra-advantage over the rest. The surfaces at Slams have a certain predictability that helps the world to prepare for these challenges. Since the courts remain true to their nature year after year, players can aspire to train to master those conditions and topple the favourites.

Putting long hours on clay can see a Carlos Alcaraz be the next Nadal. But can a young Aussie batsman hope to score big in India if he trains hard enough on a dry spin-friendly surface? Not if the pitches are the kind that the visitors have got in this BGT series.

The ICC match-referee Chris Broad while rating the Indore pitch ‘poor’ had this to say. “The fifth ball of the match broke through the pitch surface and continued to occasionally break the surface providing little or no seam movement and there was excessive and uneven bounce throughout the match.” Imagine the heart-break of a batsman if he would have fallen on that dubious 5th ball of the match because of the wicked wicket. That certainty wouldn’t be cricket.

Sports stands out from other human activities because of the purity of competition. It rewards hard work and doggedness. A batsman’s fate can’t be decided by bad bounce, surely not in a sport like cricket which doesn’t give you a second chance. The objectivity of the contest is lost if sports turns into a lottery.

India in their pursuit to continue their rich legacy of winning at home succumbed to their desperation. By over-tweaking the conditions, India not just fell in their own trap but more importantly undermined the ethos of sport. In that documentary of the 50s tours, the tourists said that they considered unwashed hands of waiters as a bigger threat to them than the fingers of the Indian spinners. Now, their fate is in the soiled hands of curators.