You can shout from the rooftops, you can sing it as a lullaby; you can print it in a textbook or say it quietly in an inconsequential piece like this one. But nobody will listen to the oldest truth of this game. Good pitches produce good cricket, bad pitches produce bad cricket. A fifth- day pitch that is as sleepy as a backbencher in a civics class is a bad pitch. And so we have had a bad Test match. Maybe we should ask Shahrukh to make a film about it, maybe we should get a Kareena Kapoor or a Priyanka Chopra to enact a raunchy number about it and maybe then, somebody will emerge from the shatteringly important issue of writing columns to listen.
It doesn’t matter whether or not the chairman of selectors writes a column. It does matter if we play boring Test matches. So where then do the priorities lie? And the disease is spreading. I have been asked to be on a radio programme and a television show about the Vengsarkar issue but nobody has asked why we are playing cricket on slow, low, pedestrian pitches. Soon our idea of livening up pitches will be to get a starlet to dance on it, or a tarot card reader to spread her cards on it! I turned down both requests by the way. I find the Vengsarkar issue trivial and unnecessary. The playing of cricket is getting increasingly marginalised from the cricket world.
And so we continue to send out the wrong signals. We don’t have to worry about a coach, about a permanent manager, about a cricket calendar, about unhappy captains, about systems for selectors to work within. Or about pitches and bright cricket. In three weeks we play a Test match in Melbourne on what is bound to be a fresh, bouncy pitch. India will need three seamers in the playing eleven. Today, we cannot find two to pick in the first fifteen. But the most important thing about the selection committee meeting is not that. It is about whether or not the chairman of selectors will attend. Really!
... contd.
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