Had India not lost four wickets in the opening hour on the first day here in Ahmedabad, chances are this Test match would have fallen asleep long before lunch on the fifth day, and both captains admitted that there was little they could have done to get a result on the surface.

“I wouldn’t play any cricket on this wicket,” Mahendra Singh Dhoni said with a smile, when asked if such pitches provided good advertisement for Test cricket.

Kumar Sangakkara, meanwhile, had started laughing even before the question was put to him. “Well, if you’re a batsman, you’ll probably love it,” he said at the post-match press conference. “I don’t think anyone expected this wicket to be this flat.”

Sangakkara added that his team’s best chance of getting their first win in India was on the first morning, not when they declared with India 334 behind with one-and-a-half days’ play left. “We had our best chance on the first morning and we just let it go with the line and length we bowled after lunch and tea. There was nothing there in the last two days.”

Dhoni said that even though the team had lost four big wickets early, he knew they weren’t out of the match. “Even at that time, we knew that whichever batsman got in and settled down would go on to score a hundred. We expected the pitch to have a little more bounce for the spinners but there was no help for anyone, either the fast bowlers or the spinners.”

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