The plot hardens

Going by their track record, and given their penchant for making tall promises, one suspects the men who run the BCCI would do very well in Indian politics. Not long after the Pitches and Grounds Committee was formed, Jagmohan Dalmiya invited experts from the New Zealand Sports Turf Institute to study Indian pitches and give their recommendations. The gentlemen concerned stayed in India for 21 days, and submitted a voluminous report to the BCCI. Lifeless as the pitches it pontificates on, that report gathers dust in the BCCI headquarters.

Dalmiya talks of accountability in the manner of an MNC CEO rather than that of the Marwari businessman he clearly is. India hasn't won a Test in Australia, South Africa, England, New Zealand or the West Indies in over 15 years, but instead of preparing sporting wickets within the country, the BCCI prefers to prevaricate without looking for a long-term solution, for the short-term gratification of preparing spin-friendly tracks which will win India many a home-series, and much television revenue.

Gopal Bose, who has been on the committee, says the BCCI wanted the world to believe that it was keen to address the problem, but in practice it frustrated the committee by giving in to the narrow demands of the team management. "We simply did not get a free hand to function. We were throttled. I finally quit in disgust," says Bose, a member of the Indian team that toured England in 1974.

Home truths
It is, popular wisdom holds, batsmen and spinners who do well at home and badly abroad; interestingly though, Indian pace bowlers also tend to underperform overseas. Kapil Dev, Karsan Ghavri, Javagal Srinath, Venkatesh Prasad and Manoj Prabhakar all have much better averages and strike-rates at home than they do abroad (see box). It is not the nature of their craft that impacts their performance overseas, but the grooming of it.

Skill and talent can only get you so far; ability needs to be honed and groomed in suitable conditions. A pace bowler brought up to bowl on flat tracks with a low bounce will not adapt easily to bouncier tracks abroad because the skill-sets he developed in his formative years are of an entirely different nature. Srinath is a case in point; abroad, he keeps pitching on a length that, on bouncy tracks, is hopelessly short. On Indian tracks, though, that length is perfectly acceptable.

Another common fallacy is that it is not possible to prepare fast pitches in India. Alvin Kallicharran, captain of the 1978-79 West Indies team, lauded the Madras wicket as the fastest he had played on - faster than even Perth, which is acknowledged as the paciest in the world. Norbert Phillip, Sylvester Clarke and Kapil were lethal in that match with the new ball, but as Gundappa Viswanath and S Venkataraghavan showed, there was something in it for the skillful batsmen and spinners as well. Dhiraj Parsana - one of the two members on the committee - made his Test debut in that match.

When soil from the moon can be brought to earth, can soil from one centre not be flown to another? The Perth wicket, for example, was flown in because the WACA is on naturally sandy soil, while Sharjah has a pitch in the middle of a desert. The finest ground in India, Mohali, has soil brought in from Ludhiana for its world-class bouncy pitches (see pg. 20). If it has the will, the richest cricket board in the world can surely emulate that example elsewhere.

Given their latest pronouncements, it would seem that the Pitches and Grounds Committee is serious about reforming Indian cricket. The key, however, lies not in the sincerity of their objectives, but in the autonomy given to them by the BCCI. The ball is on their pitch now.