KOLKATA: When the players walked off for bad light on Day One of the first Test between India and South Africa, there were people who were retaining their counsel about the state of the surface. The bounce was already uneven, there were already some mini-explosions and turn was ample for the spinners, even from good length areas.
These kinds of pitches, it was thought, would be left behind by the new regime led by Shubman Gill and Gautam Gambhir. They had kind of shown an inclination towards wickets where the bowlers would have to work hard. Gill, on the eve of the West Indies series, had said as much. "We want to play hard, grinding cricket," the captain had declared.
Post their 2-0 win, Gambhir didn't necessarily contradict his captain but he had expressed his displeasure about the state of the surface. He specifically wanted a wicket with more carry. "I thought that we could have had a better wicket here."
At lunch on Day Two, it wouldn't have been hard to imagine the support staff uttering those exact same words to each other within the comforts of the dressing room at the Eden Gardens but for a different reason.
One of India's most storied grounds — on the occasion of a first Test in six years - had spawned a Frankenstein of a surface. Balls were ragging square, some were jumping like an agitated snake, a few were keeping low and sneaking underneath... it genuinely seemed like the only guaranteed outcome when going out to bat was a batter getting out.
Back-to-back Ravindra Jadeja balls in the Proteas' 21st over showed the existing demons in the track. On a pitch almost tailor made for the southpaw, one good length delivery, fired at 94kph, bounced and turned big past Tristan Stubbs's outside edge. Rishabh Pant had to show incredible awareness to follow the trajectory to prevent it from running away for four byes. Pant managed to laugh looking at the turn.
Moments later, there was no turn from another length ball but this one also reared before it hit Stubbs's gloves. He was lucky that it didn't go to silly point where Dhruv Jurel was stationed. Stubbs wasn't laughing.
Six Jadeja balls later, the left-arm spinner was laughing but Stubbs wasn't. This one also pitched on length but rather than coming in, it turned away just a tad. It beat Stubbs's outside edge before kissing the stumps.
India didn't expect pitch to deteriorate this quickly
With the pitch doing all sorts all the time, stand-in skipper Pant — Gill, who had retired hurt with neck stiffness earlier in the day — was conscious of chasing anything in excess of 100. It's why there were boundary riders at all times. When the shadows lengthened and the players went off, the visitors were leading by 63 but only had three wickets remaining. On a strip like this though, a target of 100 may seem like 200.
Bowling coach Morne Morkel hadn't envisaged conditions like this on the morning of the game. "To be honest," he said after the day's play to a question on whether they would prefer bowling in conditions like this as compared to Delhi, "even we didn't expect the wicket to deteriorate so quickly. Looking at it the day before the game, the morning of the game and after the first couple of overs, I thought this is a good wicket. So, it's a bit unexpected for it to deteriorate this quickly. But it's the beauty sometimes of playing in the sub-continent. You need to adapt to the conditions quite quickly. We obviously want to play to our strengths; saying that, we have got quality with both seam and spin. We have covered our bases."
After last year's 3-0 shock against the Kiwis at home, the team management, it was felt, had gone away from preparing spin-friendly tracks as it was seen as narrowing the skill gap between their spinners and the ones from the visiting team.
The Eden surface has once again bridged that gap.
Pitch not watered since Saturday
Curiously, the pitch hadn't been watered since last Saturday even though the Indian team hadn't explicitly asked for a turner. Speaking to reporters on Monday, Saurav Ganguly, Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB) president, had said: "it looks like a good one."
CAB curator, Sujan Mukherjee, was quoted as saying to a news agency that the deck would start taking turn by the third day. "It’s going to be a good sporting wicket with help for both batters and bowlers," Mukherjee was quoted as saying. "There will be assistance on offer for the spinners as well, and that can happen early as well." Usually, when a pitch hasn't been watered from that far out, the accepted wisdom is it can crumble fairly quickly. But Harmer, who had experiences of playing on strips in that infamous 2015 series, maintained that it wasn't as bad as the ones in Mohali, Nagpur and so on.
On Sunday, with no tickets officially available, fans are expected to stream in. But the game itself may not last even half a day.
