The home-ground advantage seems only to be increasing in most parts of the Test world. For a variety of reasons – from drop-in pitches to the desire for five-day Tests – Australia is becoming the exception.
Daniel Brettig in Perth31-Oct-20162:51
A few pitches in Australia have lost their characteristics – Starc
Australia’s players haven’t the foggiest idea what sort of pitch they will be getting for the first Test of the summer. In some ways, that is how they like things to be. In others, it sums up a creep away from the sorts of conditions Australian cricketers have grown up to expect.Through tours of England in 2015 and Sri Lanka earlier this year, the men in Steven Smith’s side have felt a certain sense of irritation at the pitches served up. Not so much because they have been difficult; more so because they have been prepared very much with the home side in mind. From the coach Darren Lehmann down to the possible debutant Joe Mennie, every member of this team knows that to make such requests in Australia is to expect a gob-full in response from the curator.In England there was actually a change in the sorts of pitches Alastair Cook’s side wanted from match to match within the series itself. Initially the coach Trevor Bayliss and the head of cricket Andrew Strauss desired slow, dry pitches to reduce the influence of Mitchell Johnson. But when Australia dominated on a flat surface at Lord’s, the diktat moved to green seamers, resulting in tracks at Birmingham and Nottingham the visitors were utterly unable to cope with.Sri Lanka’s surfaces were a little more consistent: slow and spinning. They were of the kind made to order for the hosts, and exploited brilliantly once so prepared. In this context, Australia’s players yearned to get back to home, not for pitches weighted to favour them, but merely to play on surfaces not prepared with any one or two bowlers in mind.”I think we prepare really good Test match pitches, there’s something in there for everyone,” said the spin bowler and sometime curator Nathan Lyon. “We go and travel overseas and it does tend to favour one team more than the other. Our curators do a fantastic job and I’m always going to stick up for them.”Oddly for a team most recently defined by pace, Lyon’s offbreaks are actually the best measure of how much Australia’s players prefer playing at home. Down under, Lyon has 101 Test wickets in 26 matches at 31.97, a record superior to any spinner to visit from overseas this side of Mushtaq Ahmed. But away, in conditions ostensibly better suited to his art, Lyon’s 110 wickets in 31 Tests have cost 33.56 apiece.”I’m going back to the way I’ve been bowling best in Australia for the last 18 to 24 months now, so I’ll keep going down that game plan and my little blueprint I work off bowling here in Australia,” Lyon said of this summer. “But when we come to subcontinent conditions again I’m going to have to re-evaluate and prepare for that. I’m not going in the nets this afternoon and bowling in subcontinent conditions, that’s for sure.”Australian comfort at home does, in many ways, transcend the individual pitches themselves. As Usman Khawaja put it, the subtleties of each venue, the heat, the size of the outfields and their best scoring zones, are augmented by loud, supportive and at times merciless crowds. Australia’s healthy culture of Test match attendances helps too.”I think it’s just experience,” Khawaja said. “We’ve played at these grounds so often, that’s what we lack when we go overseas a little bit, we don’t have experience on these grounds while playing in the match scenario. But we play on these grounds so often, we know pretty much everything about the grounds there is to know and we can draw on those things. We know how the pitch is going to react and what’s going to happen.”The crowd makes a big difference too when you have the crowd behind you. When things are going well the crowd just comes over you. I’m sure when we’re taking wickets and on a roll and the opposition batsmen are rolling in, the crowd is all over them, I think it makes a difference. They play a fair part in it too.”However a world in which guaranteed days of play in Test matches are beloved of administrators and broadcasters has gradually eaten away at the fundamental advantage available to Australia: extra pace and bounce. Early finishes, however dominant by the home side, have long been deemed troubling for state associations in particular. Similarly, the introduction of drop-in pitches in Melbourne, Adelaide and soon at Perth’s new stadium mean further homogenisation.The new Perth stadium, due to open in 2018, will be yet another Australian Test venue with drop-in pitches•Getty ImagesWhen the WACA Test against New Zealand last summer creaked towards the bore draw that hastened Mitchell Johnson’s retirement, the ABC’s doyen commentator Jim Maxwell dubbed it a “CEO’s pitch” designed to keep the game going five days. It was on a similarly long-lasting surface that South Africa chased their epochal 414 to win in Perth in 2008 and set Ricky Ponting’s team on the path to their first home series defeat in more than 15 years.Likewise the pitches in 2010-11 were flat enough to allow Cook, Strauss, Jonathan Trott, Kevin Pietersen and Ian Bell to dominate increasingly dispirited Australian bowlers. There is still a small advantage to be gained by Australia at home, but they must be at their very best to extract it.”I think other countries around the world do that home advantage a lot better,” Mitchell Starc said of the contrast he sees between home and away. “The wickets in Australia have got a lot flatter in Shield cricket and Test cricket over the years. You just want to see that even contest. If you go back to the Adelaide [day/night] Test match, regardless of how many days it lasted, the whole Test was just an even contest between bat and ball for two and a half days, and it turned out to be the best Test match of the summer.”I think that’s what teams want to see and fans want to see, you don’t want to see blokes just scoring runs for fun and nothing in it for the bowlers. At the same time I don’t think people want to see teams bowled out for 100 in all four innings. We just want to see that even contest. And you still want to keep some characteristics of wickets around Australia.”You want to see the fast, bouncy wickets of the WACA. You might want to see a turning wicket at the SCG. It’s obviously not going to happen in Adelaide with the pink ball stuff – but you generally see a hard wicket at the start and it breaks up towards the end and you get a bit of reverse swing. The Gabba is obviously a fantastic wicket, where there is enough in it for both teams for five days. You don’t want to lose those characteristics, but I guess the wickets have definitely got flatter over the years.”If Australia’s home advantage is thinner than for other nations, against South Africa it narrows to the width of a sheet of paper. Australians love touring South Africa – having never lost there since reunification – and the reverse is also true.Not a single member of the South African side has experienced a Test series loss in Australia, and not a single Australian has won over the Proteas here. “South Africa and Australian conditions are fairly related,” Hashim Amla said, “and I think that’s why we have over the last two series we’ve had here, had some success.”At Australia’s training session on Monday afternoon, Lehmann set the wicketkeeper and slips back to near enough a pitch-length away from the bat for a catching session. This is the traditional WACA distance, but bore no relation to what was served up last year. That rather summed up Australia at home – the national team are hopeful of conditions to suit them, but have no way of knowing for sure.”We always talk about adapting to conditions,” Starc said. “I think [home] can help, but the way we approach our cricket is you have to change the way you play depending on what is in front of you. Regardless of what we get at the WACA, we’re going to be ready to go and hopefully there’s enough in it for the bowlers. That would be lovely to see.”