Nothing Wrong in Any Team Using Home Pitch Advantage

As Australia’s fast bowlers bounced right back from the Darwin debacle with the irrepressible Mitchell Starc dominating with swing at high pace, the debate over home advantage might just expand with another talking point.

It is somewhat ironic that the world’s highest ranking Test team should need the home advantage but so fragile is the batting that it needed its ageing purveyors of pace to extricate it from the Darwin drubbing.

With qualifying for the Test championship final becoming more urgent with time passing in the year, Australia had to think up the rugged pitch of pace at Mackay in Queensland that could send the ball seaming off the surface for a fair number of overs with the Kookaburra ball.

Starc was irresistible in the conditions because he pitches right up, including the swinging yorker length with the new ball, to keep the batsmen guessing about the length. And yet the surface was not so unplayable that a team should be shot out for just over 150 runs in two innings, to lose by an innings and 51 runs.

Had the match been played in India or elsewhere, there would have been a hue and cry about the pitch conditions with English and Australian comments men pouncing on the surface, calling it a Bunsen Burner, Designer turner, etc. And ICC would have been prompt to put out a damning pitch rating.

A 2-day Test in Australia would be excused as it would be put down to poor batting, by both sides in this case. What any argument would not be taking into account the fact that the Bangladesh team had just shown a touch of maturity in the way they played and won the first Test. That they should be rolled over for so little cannot be put down only to Starc’s brilliance.

There was an equally merited show of quality left arm swing and seam bowling by Shoriful Islam (6-35), which went to show that the pitch was not up to Test standards, not in today’s T20-dominated cricket in which batsmen are so easily put off by any movement, swing, seam or spin. Test pitches have been marked as poor by the ICC for lesser reasons. A two-day Test match says enough about the surface.

Of course, the deliberate employment of the home pitch advantage can cut both ways. There have been too many instances of a home team being hoist by their own petard, as the saying goes. India may have been the latest victim of the syndrome as they were wiped out in two recent Test series, at the hands of New Zealand and South Africa.

Sri Lanka may be undergoing the same experience as their usual Galle trick of a slow turner at the start of a series backfired with Team India batting impeccably in their first essay on winning the toss. The problem with turners, even if as slow as the one in Galle, is that the toss become all too vital with the team batting first enjoying the distinct advantage.

Sri Lanka responded with a greenish tinged pitch at the SSC. As the home team, it had the right to follow the line of thinking that only a result pitch would suit the team one down in the series. But losing the toss and dropping the prolific Devdutt Padikkal twice early would not have helped. India was building on the advantage of first strike on such a pitch which can be expected to settle down quickly enough from early freshness.

The point is don’t give the sub-continentals a bad name just because they believe it is fair game to take the home advantage that cricket has historically offered. The result may not always be the desired one as both India and Sri Lanka know from their most recent experiences but that does not defeat the argument that it is fair game to make a ‘home’ pitch in Test cricket.

No one would support pitch tampering as in the making of dusty, vile turners which are quite the reverse of the grass-filled pitch tops that one is accustomed to seeing in England and New Zealand. There too, results have often rebounded to the chagrin of home teams. I rest my case of home advantage but don’t play that card to the extremes of 2-day Test finishes or totals that are in low double figures.

R. Mohan is Resident Editor of Chennai and Tamil Nadu editions of Deccan Chronicle.