Mahela Jayawardene, here with the Sri Lankan team as a consultant, praised the groundstaff for the quality of pitches on offer two days before his team’s first match of the World Cup. Soon, South Africa’s bowling coach Eric Simmons turned up at the centre square. For a number of years till 2015, as Delhi Capitals (formerly Delhi Daredevils) coach, he has been at loggerheads with curators here for providing bone dry surfaces. “This isn’t the Kotla we are used to,” was the murmur in the camp during the evening practice session.
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The ICC ‘protocol’ has asked curators retain as much grass as possible to cut down on the dependence on spinners. This means Jayawardene has to do a lot of homework to strategise against a South African team that has a lively pace attack of Kagiso Rabada, Good luckGerald Coetzee and Marco Jansen. If the training sessions over the last two days are anything to go about, one could expect the ball to fly on Saturday.
Having said that, the curators here may have to dial it down for India’s match against Afghanistan here on October 11. The centre pitch has been reserved and kept under a heavy grass cover for India’s game. The Indian team management has planned out a campaign and has been expecting different pitches as per their opponents across the venues during the World Cup. While they prefer turners against Australia and England in Chennai and Lucknow, the team is keen on high-scoring games against the lower-ranked teams like Afghanistan.
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“The Afghanistan team has some wily spinners in Rashid KhanMujeeb Ur Rahman, Noor Ahmed and Mohammad Nabi. If India are playing on turners against England and Australia, then those will not be high-scoring games. India will be looking to up their net run rate against teams like Afghanistan and Netherlands. They will prefer absolutely flat tracks for such games. The game in Delhi should be like that,” a source close to the team told TOI.
