THE GOOGLY: War on plastic should extend to hybrid pitches

HUW TURBERVILL: Variety is the spice of life – and let’s face it, we could talk for hours about pitches. How green they are. How flat. How treacherous. When will the cracks appear?

“There’s too much talk about the pitch in cricket…”

The comment didn’t so much bowl me over as skittle me out for 46 at Trinidad.

OK, the propensity to talk out of your hat is greater in cricket than any other sport.

I distinctly recall failing to control my guffaws when a punter walked into the pub where I was serving (holiday job) and started telling me what a good bowler that Shaun Wayne was…

But this was from somebody who should have known better: a respected cricket writer of longstanding.

I was astonished.

Pitch variables – and all that that comes with it – are a fundamental part of the game.

“Far too much is made of it,” he added. “It’s all about how good a batsman or bowler is it, nothing to do with the pitch.”

Absurd, surely? The most extreme example to illustrate that is Test pitches on the subcontinent which encourage captains to open up with a spinner – as Mehidy Hasan did with tremendous success for Bangladesh at home to England in 2017.

Dustbowls that have had Muttiah Muralitharan, Anil Kumble, Rangana Herath, Harbhajan Singh, Abdul Qadir and co licking their lips, not to mention their spinning fingers.

Spin-friendly/seam-unfriendly wickets made Kapil Dev’s bowling record all that more remarkable – 219 home wickets at 26 apiece, 215 at 32 away.

Or those rock-hard pitches in the Caribbean that you could see your reflection in as you watched Patrick Patterson charge in to bowl at you.

Of course pitches are important. The Oval, with its Ongar Loam caressed by Harry Brind’s loving embrace, had pace and bounce; now it’s just pretty flat (which made Tim Paine’s decision to bowl first in the final Test of the summer there pretty puzzling).

^{Karl McDermott was appointed as groundsman at Lord's in September}

Lord’s is currently a bit sluggish and benign, and the ball nibbles around a bit (but Karl McDermott seems to be winning the battle to improve them); Headingley is flat and becomes flatter; Old Trafford is spin-friendly, and has bounce; Trent Bridge is a super all-round cricket pitch. And so on.

Variety is the spice of life – and let’s face it, we could talk for hours about pitches. How green they are. How flat. How treacherous. When will the cracks appear? Will the low bounce become a problem? Will the top break up?

Which makes the prospect of hybrid pitches so unappealing – certainly for first-class matches.

Most outdoor sports need pitches but apart from the general need for them to be flat (especially in bowls, but also in rugby, tennis and football), there are never so many variables as in cricket. Caroline Wozniacki must have been talking about cricket when she said: “On grass, it can be the small things that decide a match.”

Lord’s and Edgbaston have partly synthetic pitches which will be used, for the most part, for practice and minor matches. The pitch is more than 90 per cent grass but features loops of plastic yarn.

Plastic? For county cricket. Yuck. Anything that makes cricket blander, more uniform and generic should be actively discouraged.

We have already been there with drop-in pitches. Who can ever forget New Zealand v England at Christchurch in 2001/02? Nasser Hussain set the hosts 550 and the drop-in pitch turned into a road. Nathan Astle spanked 222 and at one stage England were seriously on the ropes. It was ridiculously good batting by Astle and/or a ridiculous pitch.

With County Championship matches shunted to the margins of the season in April and September, possibly the biggest bugbear of readers of The Cricketer (OK apart from that tournament), one can see the practical value of them I guess. But if hybrid pitches are the answer, there is something fundamentally wrong with the question.