India vs South Africa, 3rd Test: Beach of a pitch, or a peach of pitch?

A four-day game?

The talk on Monday afternoon, with a pleasantly warm sun showering the upturned bucket seats all around this modern stadium, revolved around the 22-yard track, tiger reserve, jokes about how quickly the Test can wrap up. All that mocking isn’t the worst snub that a No. 1 Test team has endured; the worst is actually this — sympathy from the locals.

“We hope that they can bat decently and we can have a four-day Test match,” say a couple of men putting up the banners around the ground. The journalists were already planning for the trip to safari and all this before the start of a Test in a series that is still live. It says much about how the South Africans have eroded their own aura, a strange state of affairs considering that this Indian batting line-up isn’t remotely hot.

It gave rise to the thought about whether the Indian cricketers were surprised at how easily the South Africans have folded up so far. M Vijay didn’t answer that in affirmative, understandably so as that would have given the whiff of overconfidence or complacency. Instead, he chose to talk about how the Indians have managed to exert pressure. “The bowling has been real good, I have been fielding close to the bat and saw how much pure pressure we have managed to put them under.” Somehow it doesn’t wash. Surprise has been the prevailing emotion of the tour.

If the pitch does turn out as expected then the same visuals of disintegration can be cued up again. Unconvincing prods, tentative leaves. aura crumbling on dust-swirls. Indians won’t be complaining how easily the unravelling has occurred.

The Indians too queued up to have a look at the pitch on Monday. Ravi Shastri and Bharat Arun, those friends of curators across the country, were the first to hop over the rope near the centre pitch. Handshakes were exchanged with the curator Amar Karlekar, a tap on the shoulder too followed and not long after, Virat Kohli breezed into the area. Soon, Ravichandran Ashwin, the de-facto vice-captain of this team, made an entry and had a quick word with Kohli before having a long chat by the pitch with Shastri. He then bowled on the adjacent pitch for a while. His new(ish) action makes for quite a fascinating watch. The right arm arches right back, behind the shoulder, the left hand stretches out to hold balance, the chest puffs out and then the upper body recoils into place as he delivers. Around him, the team started to dissipate towards the batting nets outside the playing arena, followed by the media jamboree.

Three-spinners track

With the training session almost out of vision with its darkly shaded nets, one could only pick out who were batting and not how they batted. Interestingly, Rohit Sharma, who had a close and early look at the pitch, was very active through the session, batting for a long while, re-entering the main ground for some close-in catching drills, and triggering speculations that he might replace Stuart Binny. The dry track, though, seems to be an invitation for Amit Mishra, the legspinner, to be played and it will be interesting to see the final team combination. For all you know, India might even go in with Ishant Sharma as their lone pacer, and play three spinners, and Rohit Sharma.

The last domestic match played on this strip, in October, had seen the spinners taking 16 wickets. The tweakers had come in as early as the sixth over of the game and more of the same can be expected here. That one, though, lasted four days and the curator does take care to make a point that this Test can also go the full stretch. It’s the quality of the batting that has made him make a few of the light-hearted comments, he says. He says he doesn’t expect any shockingly-low bounce on this track. It’s also expected to play slow. And it’s a powdery surface, not one of those cracked surfaces that can disintegrate rapidly. If the batsmen do apply themselves, they can succeed.

Even on this “beach”, the South Africans can swim. The real question is whether they believe they can.