How India’s seamers schooled South Africa’s seamers on a pitch Temba Bavuma called similar to home
Karthik Krishnaswamy in Pune12-Oct-2019Below the West Stand of the Maharashtra Cricket Association Stadium in Pune are two cavernous rooms accessed via the same staircase. One is the press-conference room. To get there, you have to pass the other room, which is usually locked. You can’t see what’s inside, but you can smell it. Dogs. Some 20 guard dogs, employed by the association to assist the stadium security staff.Watch cricket on ESPN+
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Test cricket is supposed to feel, and perhaps even smell, like 11 Rottweilers tearing into a piece of steak sitting four feet from the stumps. At its fiercest, this intensity should communicate itself to the spectators.For the best part of the first two days of the Pune Test, the cricket didn’t feel like that. And then, an hour from stumps on day two, someone went and let the guard dogs out.
Look, if I could speak on the pitch itself, it was quite similar to what you would get back home in South Africa. I honestly felt that it was quite suited to our strength as a bowling unitTemba Bavuma
This was a pitch with a healthy tinge of green in it. For the first time since the Kolkata Test of 2017, India were playing three fast bowlers. The pitch for that Test was made to order, to help India prepare for the tours of South Africa, England and Australia that lay ahead. India probably didn’t request this one in Pune – they surely weren’t going to try that when the series was still alive, and not against South Africa’s fast bowlers. In any case, it wasn’t a green top in quite the same way. It was far better to bat on, and in his pitch report, Sunil Gavaskar suggested the grass was only there to help bind the soil and prevent it from breaking up too early.South Africa’s quicks had first use of the pitch, and though there was enough seam and bounce to keep them interested for at least the first half of the first day, they didn’t worry the batsmen unduly. Vernon Philander, Kagiso Rabada and Anrich Nortje ended up with combined figures of 81-14-259-3 as India ran away to 601 for 5 declared.Umesh Yadav jolted South Africa early with a couple of wickets•BCCIIn a similar situation at any point before, say, 2016, India fans might have told themselves that it was now up to the spinners – ‘if Philander, Rabada and a new guy bowling 147kph can’t get anything out of this surface, what can our lot do?’With this current lot of India pacers, though, you would wait and watch before pronouncing judgment.You didn’t have to wait too long, because South Africa were 53 for 5 before they knew it. Umesh Yadav took three of those wickets, Mohammed Shami two.Temba Bavuma, one of the batsmen swept away by that irresistible tide, couldn’t quite put a finger on what India’s quicks did differently to South Africa’s, but he admitted that there had been a difference.”Look, if I could speak on the pitch itself, it was quite similar to what you would get back home in South Africa,” Bavuma said at the end of the third day’s play. “I honestly felt that it was quite suited to our strength as a bowling unit.Mohammed Shami celebrates after dismissing Anrich Nortje•BCCI”Probably being hypercritical, you would have expected our bowling attack, looking at the skill that we have, to have been able to make a lot more inroads, looking at the conditions.”Their bowlers have been able to put us under pressure. It’s quite obvious in the batting totals that we’ve been able to accumulate. They’re obviously doing something that we are not doing, or their batters are just playing the bowlers better than our batters. But yeah, I think their bowlers have really hit their straps at this point in time.”What was that something that Umesh and Shami did that Philander, Rabada and Nortje did not? The numbers suggest India’s lengths were perhaps better suited to the conditions than South Africa’s. Both sets of fast bowlers bowled a similar percentage of good-length deliveries, according to ESPNcricinfo’s data, but the percentages either side of the good length told a story. South Africa erred on the shorter side of good, India on the fuller side.