India skipper MS Dhoni says he 'won't play any cricket' on a track like Ahmedabad
India skipperu00a0MS Dhoni says he 'won't play any cricket' on a track like Ahmedabad
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At the end of a Test match, if a captain says that he "won't play any cricket" on such a wicket, there has to be something drastically wrong with the 22-yard strip.
India skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni called the Motera wicket "one of the flattest tracks" he has played on after India lost just two wickets during the last day's play to churn out a draw in the series-opener against Sri Lanka yesterday. The fact that such wickets don't augur well for the future of the longer version was has been well and truly underlined.
Talking point
Despite Gautam Gambhir scoring another match-saving ton and Sachin Tendulkar raising his bat after scoring a century for the 43rd time in Test cricket, which helped India first wipe out the 332-run first innings deficit and race to 412 for four when both the teams shook hands with each other, it was the pitch that remained the talking point of the match.
When the Sardar Patel Gujarat Stadium last hosted a Test match in April, the Indian team was bowled out before lunch and ended up suffering a humiliating defeat against South Africa. Though curator Dhiraj Parsana defended the grass cover as a necessity because of the soaring mercury, he received a lot of flak for keeping so much grass on the wicket.
When you compare the two Test matches and their results, it does an impression that Parsana and his team made up more than necessary for the last year's goof-up.
Daljit Singh, the head of Board of Control for Cricket in India's Pitch and Grounds Committee, certainly
believed so.
On hindsight...
"The locals who were preparing the track would have had the Test match against South Africa at the back of their minds. So in hindsight, they could have overcompensated for it. Dhiraj is very experienced and competent," Singh told MiD DAY after the match was called off at the end of ninth mandatory over.
Even Parsana, the Motera curator, admitted that he was surprised by the lack of deterioration of the wicket.
"Our aim was to prepare a result-oriented wicket, but there are things which are not is our hands, like climatic conditions. My only regret is that there was no wear and tear in the last two days there was no wear and tear," Parsana said.
No excuse, but...
"This is no excuse, but when we started preparing the wicket, the temperature was around 35 degrees and then it suddenly dropped to 30-31. I thought it will be a good batting track initially and the spinners will come into action later on, but that didn't happen." With the threat of Twenty20 looming large over the future of Test cricket, such dull draws do no good for the longest format of the game. Daljitu00a0 felt that it was bad advertisement for Test cricket. "Definitely, such wickets are in a way detrimental to the future of Test cricket. Test cricket is facing a lot of competition from T20 and ODIs. So Test wickets should be result-oriented," he said.
"Hideous draws always look shameful. On a wicket like this, where no-one has a chance of winning, it doesn't augur well."
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