Cricket used to be an exciting game because every ball was an event. But that was before the game became big business. Which is why the pitch at Kotla should be hailed as a refreshing change, and not the demon everyone is making it out to be. Cricket became indisputably the batsman’s paradise in the 2000s. With television taking over the game, the administrators organised more matches in the 2000s: 464 Tests compared with 347 in the 1990s and 1,402 one-day internationals (933 in the 1990s) to go with IPL, World Twenty20 and the Champions League. But more matches alone wouldn’t suffice. So we got more commercials per over and, often, fewer deliveries. That, too, failed to quench the commercial thirst. They wanted more runs per match, and more runs per over, and that the matches last the distance. So pitches became flatter. Perth lost pace and Sydney its turn. India’s mud cakes got baked to remove cracks and West Indian pitches lost their bite.
In the modern game, the bowler is getting increasingly marginalised. In one-day internationals, scoring more than 300 used to more or less ensure a win. These days, even more than 400 is not safe, as Sri Lanka demonstrated the other day in Rajkot. In such a match, the bowlers can merely hurl the ball and wonder whether it will race to the boundary without touching the ground. Imagine a boxing match in which each boxer gets to hit a sand bag for three minutes, and the winner is decided by who landed more punches! That punching bag is the bowlers. It is not by providence that no young kid wants to be the punching bag.
All of them want to be batsmen, who have been riding the gravy train. They revel in the shorter boundaries and bigger, reinforced bats. The bounce as a surprise weapon is dead because of stifling rules. Secure behind all the padding and the helmet, the batsmen have no fear. In nine out of 10 matches, they can simply plant their front foot forward and either hit the ball through the line or slash it. Viv Richards, the last cricketer in Test cricket who could have worn a helmet but chose not to, ever, once said this: “With the removal of fear, a certain amount of excitement has gone.”
That fear was back at Kotla, where the bowlers were back in the game and the batsmen required courage and skill to thrive. They may also have been required to take a few blows on the body, like they used to. (Steve Waugh, for example, took countless blows on the body to script his legendary match-winning knocks as Australia defeated the West Indies in West Indies to become the top Test team.) Instead, they threw in the towel and the administrators abandoned the match because of “uneven bounce”. One could almost imagine the batsmen whine: “Ouch! I did not expect that.”
If the Kotla pitch was declared unfit because of uneven bounce, the Rajkot pitch should have been declared unfit for bounce that was too even to enable a meaningful game of cricket.
