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KT edit: We need a level playing field in Test cricket

The Asian teams can create noise of their own even in silent stadiums where the ball hisses and jumps on the batsmen from a good length on raging turners to bamboozle foreign teams.

The home advantage in the sporting world may have been taken out of the equation by the sheer force of Covid-19 as teams returned to action last year behind closed doors. No fans in the stadiums for home teams means no one to inspire them for one final push for victory against a resilient opponent. Ask any athlete, and they would tell you how a roaring home crowd could reinvigorate them to fight back from the most precarious position. But when it comes to cricket, especially the traditional five-day format of the game, teams feed off the home advantage even in silent stadiums. To enjoy the home advantage, cricket teams don’t really need its proverbial 12th man – the spectator. The Asian teams can create noise of their own even in silent stadiums where the ball hisses and jumps on the batsmen from a good length on raging turners to bamboozle foreign teams. Not that England, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa have come clean.

These countries often leave layers of grass on the pitch to help their fast bowlers generate prodigious swing. It’s fine as long as we see a contest between bat and the ball, but when it tilts heavily in favour of the bowlers, and sometimes in favour of the batsmen on flat tracks, then it’s the sport that bleeds.

And it’s the game that bled when the recent Test match in Chennai left batsmen in a spin web. It’s a poor advert for Test cricket if the ball turns viciously from the first session of the game. It’s one thing to prepare a track that assists spinners, and quite another to dish out a snake pit. Perhaps, the Davis Cup in tennis is the only other sporting event where the home team is afforded the luxury of choosing its favourite surface. But even in that competition, the advantage is limited to the choice of surface — grass, hard court or clay.

It’s only in cricket that teams take the ‘home advantage’ to an absurd level. Whether making a wicket as green as the outfield in New Zealand and England or offering the visiting team rank turners in the subcontinent, the home teams in cricket occasionally make it an unfair contest. Not that it really mattered to Viv Richards, Garry Sobers and Brian Lara, the immortals that ripped the greatest Asian spinners to shreds. But even those geniuses could not have lifted their teams single-handedly out of a cricketing snake pit. After all, it’s a game, not a war. All we want is a fair contest. And for that to happen, we need a level playing field where foreign teams are not blindfolded and forced to embark on a treacherous journey.