‘When in doubt, favour the batters’: CA to pass suggestion to pitch curators

New Delhi, Aug 25 (SocialNews.XYZ) Cricket Australia (CA) will ask pitch curators to lean the balance towards the batters in the upcoming Sheffield Shield amid ongoing debates over pitches in domestic cricket and the ripple effect they have on developing Test cricketers.

The CA's operations and scheduling boss, Peter Roach, will be urging the curators to change their pitch treatment from preparing pitches favouring the bowlers to giving it a favour for the batters if they are in doubt over the conditions. This comes amid the growing criticism of the Australian surfaces in the recent past, with the latest two-day finish at Mackay being scrutinised.

Roach recently held discussions with pitch curators from Australia's red-ball venues. Moreover, state coaches also had a meeting with CA high-performance staff, and the home Test pitches were the major talking point, with Roach confirming the change of approach that they have conveyed to the curators.

"Our previous language, probably for the best part of a decade, has been that we do want to see a balance between bat and ball," Roach said, as quoted by Cricinfo. "Our curators share that view that they want to see the same, and hopefully, I think our teams do as well. But over the last decade, that's probably been a 'when in doubt, lean towards the bowler'.

"If you think about 10 years ago, when batters were having their way, and things were a bit flat, that made some sense. We still want to see results in our games. We don't want long, laborious draws. That's not good for cricket. We want to see results late in games. That's ideal. But the language that we [now want] to get across to our curators is that 'if in doubt, favour the batter,'" he added.

He added that it is crucial to "redress the balance" between the bat and the ball, which now seems to be tilting towards the bowlers in some Tests due to several factors. "[Redressing the balance] is actually in all those little decisions, trying to create the perfect balance. And our curators speak openly about this. They have hundreds of decisions to make in their preparation, depending on weather in lead-in, other games and so forth. Our language is we still want the balance, but if in doubt, lean towards the batter. That's in response to the way the game's being played," he added.

The pitches in modern-day Test cricket are being prepared with results in mind, as this is the time of the World Test Championship. Moreover, the new Kookaburra ball introduced in Australia in late 2019 has also made the ball behave differently. Australia icon batter Steve Smith had stated the same when he found batting hard during the Border-Gavaskar series in 2024-25. "Wickets have got greener, so it's kind of like the perfect storm coming together," he said. "But the ball's definitely staying harder, so I think the last three years have probably been the hardest that I've experienced in my career batting-wise, in terms of the amount of movement that's being generated.

"If you look back five years ago, you're seeing consistent 400-500s being scored in the first innings. If you put a three in front of [the score] these days, you're usually in a pretty strong position."

Source: IANS