CMJ on English pitches: Grass-roots problem of producing a level playing field (14 Sep 1998)

14 September 1998

Grass-roots problem of producing a level playing field

Christopher Martin-Jenkins

WEATHER interruptions apart, and there have been many worse seasons, there has been only one serious blight on the Britannic Assurance County Championship which reaches yet another unpredictable climax this week and once again raises the serious question of whether there is much wrong with a straight league in which each county plays the other once. I refer, course, to the nature of the pitches and the frequency of batting collapses up and down the land, writes Christopher Martin-Jenkins.

Something must be done and something will be to stop groundsmen preparing what the coach or the captain thinks will suit the home side and what will be least appealing to the opposition. In passing, though, what a curious irony it was that while every county has been guilty of a little bit of calculated preparation of pitches, when it came to a Test match Paul Brind at the Oval produced a strip tailor-made for the Sri Lankans.

What, I wonder, will Brind junior, an excellent groundsman like his father Harry, who retires this year as the England and Wales Cricket Board's adviser and inspector of pitches, produce at the Oval this week? Leicestershire, Surrey and Lancashire all retain an interest in the championship but the game which holds the key is the one between the first two. Until Surrey heard that Saqlain Mushtaq was to be reclaimed by Pakistan for the Sahara Cup, everyone assumed that Surrey would prepare a turner. Leicestershire even gave a match to their young second spinner, Carl Crowe, to prepare him for action. A lack of confidence proved to be Ian Salisbury's undoing when England gave him his chance again and it will be interesting to see if Surrey back him now, with support, perhaps, from their young left-armer Rupesh Amin.

More than once Surrey have started matches this season on pitches which have been used before, but they have still proved rather better strips than the majority on other grounds. In their damning report on Northamptonshire's skullduggery last week the pitches committee chairman, Mike Denness, stressed how keen he and his colleagues are that pitches should start sufficiently dry to give spinners their traditional chance after the first two days.

Three ideas are being considered to prevent pitches being prepared to any unfair degree to suit the home side. One is a revival of an idea first proposed by the former Hampshire captain, Nick Pocock, that the toss should be dispensed with and the visiting captain always given the choice of whether to bat or field. Another is the brainchild of his successor, Mark Nicholas: namely that there should be a small panel of pitch inspectors who would pre-empt possible trouble by being commissioned to turn up unannounced at a ground a day or two or more before a match.

If that sounds a little like the sort of solution Joseph Stalin might have come up with, I am sure that is not how it is intended. The inspectors would presumably be groundsmen themselves, like Brind senior or his successor Chris Wood; and groundsmen, like farmers, generally speak the same language and understand one another's problems.

It has been suggested that dispensing with the toss would be to interfere with the fabric of the game but the early laws of cricket, produced when the game was played on altogether rougher pitches, originally gave the captain who won the toss the choice of which pitch to use as well as of whether to bat first on it. The 1774 code gave the visiting side the choice of both. So the ECB should not be afraid of trying it for a season or two.

The third idea, often mooted, is to employ the groundsmen centrally. It is the least practical of the three, I suspect, although it might produce the sort of pitches our Test team believe will suit them.

Long before Northamptonshire got it foolishly wrong last week (incidentally the penalty imposed on the guilty county is not much consolation to the one on the receiving end of so badly underprepared a pitch - in this case it might have cost Sussex the prize money which goes with a place in next year's extra competition for the top eight in the table) it had become clear that all the batting collapses this season have not merely been the result of sensational bowling or hopeless batting techniques. In most counties it has been a difficult year for opening batsmen. But there has been a lot of rain and May was both unusually warm and unusually wet which made it a wonderful month for growing grass.

The umpires, who continue to be the best judges of the quality of pitches, have been inclined in almost every case to blame bad batting. Frequently, as at Leicester last week when Essex failed twice with the bat, or at Hove when Middlesex and Glamorgan also found pitches with bounce in them too lively for their liking, the umpires have given good marks for what they considered to be "good cricket wickets".

It really cannot be a bad thing if more pitches, including most of the relaid ones, are producing more life, especially when the bounce is consistent. They are a far better option than slow, low surfaces which make life hard for everyone, often including spectators.

If, gradually, English pitches are starting to play more like those overseas, the answer is to scrap bonus points in the championship and to play four-day matches as they do in Australia and elsewhere: points for a first-innings lead and a win.

This, plus a careful watch on the quality of pitches, would do more than anything else to produce cricketers worthy of playing for England. There are no bonus points in Test matches.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)