Test cricket gasping at the SSC

New Delhi: The 22-yard strips, like the one used in the second India-Sri Lanka Test at the Sinhalese Sports Club (SSC) in Colombo, will make it difficult for Test cricket to come off the ventilator.

Ever since the advent of T20, Test cricket had to be swiftly moved into the intensive care unit to make sure it negotiates a critical phase of its existence. But when you have close to 1500 runs scored and just 17 wickets fall in five days, bowlers requiring over 200 overs to bowl a side out, two double hundreds and three hundreds scored and a last-wicket partnership lasting almost 30 overs, the dreariness is set to soar and crash through its measurement scale.

Test cricket surely doesn’t want spectators dozing off in the ground and ambitious appeals breaking their sleeps occasionally, which was sadly how visitors to the SSC chose to watch this Test match. Nor does it want bowlers compensating their bowling failures on dead tracks by venting out their anger with some dogged batting, as was the case with Ishant Sharma and Pragyan Ojha.

In fact, what Test cricket wants is the resoluteness of the pitch curators who should strive for equilibrium in preparing those all important 22 yards. While the strip should have enough runs in it to lure crowds into the stadium, keeping the bowlers interested and bringing the contest on an even keel will definitely bring back scenes of people queuing up to watch Test cricket.

Subcontinent teams have been lining up for foreign coaches and assistance staff. Then why can’t they rope in expatriate pitch curators!

Transportable pitches – which are in vogue since long at places like New Zealand – is still a distant dream in the subcontinent.

The pitches here have always required lot of doctoring, with the most notorious of those being the one at the Ferozeshah Kotla Stadium in the Indian capital that has matches called off midway. Even the red-sand dust-bed at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai has sprung up Tests where a team like Australia fails to chase 106 in the fourth innings and the match ends inside three days.

Talking specifically about the SSC, since its inception in March 1984, the pitch there has historically hemorrhaged runs leading to some mind-boggling individual figures. The numbers of three most prolific batsmen of the modern era – Sachin Tendulkar, Brian Lara and Ricky Ponting – brings the flatness of SSC pitch to the fore.

Sachin has scored 698 runs at an average of 99.71 in the five Tests he has played there. Though Ricky Ponting and Brian Lara have played fewer tests (two and one respectively), they haven’t let the opportunity to boost their averages pass by. While Ricky Ponting made 217 runs at an average of 108.50, Lara’s figures go through the roof with 351 runs at an average of 175.50. Even Shoaib Malik has scored 340 runs in the two Tests he played at the SSC giving him an average of 113.33.

That surely is bad advertisement for Test cricket and the second India-Sri Lanka Test has been no different. Pitches with a one-way traffic is surely not the way forward, especially for Tests.