Boxing Day Test: After two players, including skipper Rohit Sharma, suffered injuries while batting in the nets ahead of Thursday’s Boxing Day Test, India may have regretted being given a dilapidated pitch to practice on.
However, Melbourne Cricket Ground chief curator Matt Page defended the practice pitches, insisting they followed age-old protocol.
In the lead-up to the Boxing Day Test of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, Rohit injured his knee and had to stop his practice session for treatment. Later, Akash Deep was also hit, with the bowler citing variable bounce as the reason.
Akash Deep suggested India were practicing on wickets used by Big Bash sides. “We keep hitting the net. That’s fine. I think this wicket was for the white ball, so sometimes the ball was kept low. But such blows are common in training,’ said Akash Deep.
However, the page said that was not the case. “For us, three days out, we prepare Test match pitches here. If the teams come and train before then, they get the pitches we got,” Page was quoted as saying by the Daily Telegraph. “Today we are on a new pitch. If India had trained (on Monday) morning, they would have been on those fresh pitches – that’s stock for us. The standard procedure is three days out.
Speaking about how the pitch is expected to behave during the Boxing Day Test, Page said it is likely to provide little help for the slower bowlers. “We have seen three great Test matches on three great pitches so far. So, for us, it’s trying to do something similar to what we’ve done the last two years and create an exciting tournament,” Page said.
Temperatures are likely to reach 40 degrees Celsius on the first day of the Boxing Day Test. Page said it could leave him with more moisture on the pitch. “It’s factored in (the weather) … how far we’ll go now, we don’t know. We’ll just monitor – with Melbourne, the weather can change quite quickly,” Page said. “That means it’s probably going to be a bit faster (in speed) than it would be if it were 20C.”
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