India vs England: Driving home the advantage, and no other spin to it

Ahmedabad, February 26: What is a perfect pitch? The romantic in you will tell that a perfect pitch is the one that favours pacers on Day 1, batsmen on Day 2 and 3 and half, and then crumbling to aid the spinners for the rest. But in the real world it seldom happens, at least it is a difficult task to achieve. The pitch at the Motera Stadium gave us a tell-tale example.

It was a pitch made with some specific tasks in mind, and the primary of them was to give as much chance as possible for the Indian spinners to be in the game. India achieved it with a good degree of success, bringing in three of them - R Ashwin, Axar Patel and Washington Sundar, though the third spinner bowled just one over in the match.

England had Dom Bess in their line-up but preferred to enter the third Test with just one spinner - Jack Leach with Joe Root doubling up as the support cast. In fact, Root ended up with astounding figures of 5/8 -better than any other spinner played in the match and that tells a story.

And the story does not read good too. It reveals batsmen's inability to master such pitches and both sides were culpable. In England's first innings, Ollie Pope stretched forward and tried to smother spin when Ashwin came from round the wicket. But there was no spin as the ball skidded through and rattled his off-stump, ball beating the outside edge of his bat.

Jonny Bairstow did it in the second innings. Bairstow was expected to beef up England's batting after the poor efforts of Dan Lawrence but the Yorkshireman never even bothered to find out the nature of the pitch, played well outside the line against imaginary turn. Axar's ball skidded through, straighter and castled him first ball.

Indian batsmen are the best players of spin, isn't it? Yes, that's the perception. But by what happened in their first innings we might just have to rethink. They were slightly better than English batsmen, only by just. Take the case of senior pros Virat Kohli and Ajinkya Rahane.

Kohli had just few balls to negotiate to see off the first day. But the Indian captain tried to cut Leach with the turn but again there was no turn on offer, the ball skidded straight on and rattled the stumps after taking bat's edge. Rahane's dismissal on Day 2 was quite similar. The ball skidded through at a brisk clip and caught Rahane on the backfoot trying to cut.

The key word here is skid. In fact, 21 wickets out of the total 30 fell to straight balls that came skidding. Yes, it was a tough pitch to bat and the pink colour with extra coat of lacquer with black seam made it all the more difficult for batsmen. But this was no infernal pitch. There were no ankle-high rockets, balls spitting out of the pitch like an angry Cobra and no uneven bounce, and in fact the bounce at the Motera was more even than on the Chepauk pitch for the second Test.

Imagine, this is not the first time Indian batsmen were found wanting against spin. Australian tweaker Steve O'Keefe hammered them at Pune in 2017 and Moeen Ali had them in a web at Southampton in 2014 and India had lost both those matches. At Motera, it happened so that England played spin worse than the home side. All you had to nullify was sharp turn. But there was no definite plan for it - there was no assured feet movement, barring on a couple occasions when Ben Stokes shimmied down against Ashwin, no involvement of wrist too.

Perhaps, demons were more in their mind than in the pitch. Axar did his bit too with clever bowling as there was no palpable difference in the action of his turner and the arm ball. Rohit Sharma acknowledged it as much.

"If I can recollect, most of the batters got out to the straighter delivery. We also as a batting unit made a lot of mistakes while batting, it's not just England. We also didn't bat well in the first innings. Pitch had nothing as such, no such demons as we call, there was nothing like that. It was a nice pitch to bat on. Once you're in, you can score runs, as we saw, but again, you just need to apply and keep concentrating," said Rohit.

Here you can discount the "nice pitch" part because a home side player will hardly say anything else, but the fact remains that it was not a hellish track either. Then comes the question of whether it is morally right to prepare such pitches. If you go by the book, the existing rules have nothing against it. Every team try to drive in the home advantage in one way or the other and it is not a wrong tactic either, though it can polarise the opinions and can disappoint stakeholders like broadcasters and spectators.

England had showed the effrontery to win the first Test at Chennai, their sixth win on the trot in Asia and that's not a record to scoff at. It was clear that India will prepare pitches that would tilt the balance in their favour as England has the potential to hurt them.

Test match is so compelling because it offers different challenges. It asks the players some really tough questions and Motera was not an exception. The only difference here was that batsmen from both the sides resembled underprepared exam candidates, who made the pitch look like a riddle that it wasn't.