Tailor-made fast-deteriorating pitches can be good for a team. But is it good for the sport?

In tennis, for example, each Grand Slam is played on a different surface. But you do largely know the characteristics of each surface and they stay true for the duration of a match, if not a tournament. The grass of Wimbledon does not suddenly behave like the clay of Roland Garros. In football, this is much the same. While some pitches are harder than others, the only thing that interferes with conditions is rain, or in rare cases, snow.

In cricket, especially Test cricket, a pitch changes and evolves over five days of play. The tradition was that the pitch was designed to last five days. In fact, one of the definitions of a successful Test match is the two teams going into the final day with all four results possible.

Also, a pitch was designed keeping in mind bringing all different sets of players into play. At one time or another, there was assistance to the quick bowlers, the batsmen and the slow bowlers. That at least was the theory, and by and large the aim.

All this has gone out of the window in the recent past, all over the world, with teams attempting to maximise home advantage. There’s nothing wrong with this, and all teams do it, even though some claim that the cricket team and the cricket board have no say in the matter and just leave it in the hands of each ground’s curator.

In India’s case, Rohit just publicly admitted that it was the team who set down the marker on what kind of pitches they wanted. And, if you watch the ground in the days leading up to a Test or in the breaks of play during the game, you would have seen Rahul Dravid, the head coach, inspecting the pitch repeatedly, usually with the Board of Control for Cricket in India’s pitch expert, Taposh Chatterjee, in tow.

Rohit also said that he was fully aware of the pitfalls of preparing pitches that spun hard from the first day. But, an inevitable consequence of preparing pitches that are dry and turn from the word go is variable bounce. In hot Indian conditions, pitches take a beating, and when they are dry they are bound to break. What happens then, is that matches do not go the distance. The statistics are pretty straightforward: In the 2018-2023 media rights cycle, for which Star Sports paid Rs 6,138 crore for matches in India, already 30 days have been lost because of early finishes. Of the 19 Tests played in this period, 10 have ended inside three days, two have finished on the second day, four on the fourth day and only three Tests have gone into a fifth day.

Rohit also said that it did not really matter whether the team won in two days or in five.

Now, this is certainly true in the context of the team, but in the larger picture, this is far from the case. The travelling fan is the one who is hit most hard, with hotel rooms and flights largely being non-refundable, which is the case when you book early looking for the best deal.

For state associations, who pay out for security, make allowances for costs including to the police who provide security, for contractors who put up infrastructure, the contracts are all per Test match, not per match day.

For vendors at the ground who pay a premium for their stalls, again, it’s the same case, with costs being fixed and income slashed. There is a whole ecosystem and economy allied to a match that begins on the premise that the game is of five days’ duration. In the event of rain and a match not being played at all, many of these losses are recovered through insurance. But no insurer will shell out on account of a match ending early for cricketing reasons.

Even if you set aside the financial side of things for a moment, there is a philosophical question that needs to be asked. Sure, for the team, the main aim should be winning. But, for the cricket board, this can’t be the beginning and end of it.

Taking spectators — whether at the ground, on television or via the Internet — for granted, is playing with fire. And producing pitches that don’t last the distance does just that. Pitches are at the heart of this great game, and any cardiologist will tell you that you don’t perform surgery on a perfectly good heart to try and make it better. You nurture it, you take care of it, you protect it, and let nature do the rest.