What’s inside players’ heads counts for more than what’s on top of the pitch

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE, Cape Town

CENTURION soars up, up and away on the wings of seam and swing. St George’s Park snoozes so slow and low it is going to disappear without trace. Newlands never fails to deliver a fair contest. Wanderers wants you and your fistful of fast bowlers to win - unless you put a couple of ballsy bastards at the batting crease. Kingsmead kind of slips away to nothing, like a Durban sunset.

So goes the lowdown on SA’s test pitches. But is that accurate? And how much of it is informed not by fact but by teams’ opinions, which are fractured through the prism of their strengths and weaknesses?

For instance, although Centurion is indeed a fine place to bowl fast, it is also the best test ground in the country for run-scoring. Going into SA’s series against West Indies, no venue topped Centurion’s test runrate of 3.62. In first-class terms, only Potchefstroom is more generous to batsmen in SA. And only just - 3.63.

SA have won two out of their last seven tests at St George’s Park and three of the most recent eight played at Kingsmead. Many will not be surprised - those are the grounds where SA’s attack are less effective because of the conditions.

But SA won three of the five tests played in Port Elizabeth before their leaner run there. In Durban, they were beaten once and won six of the previous 13 tests.

That encompasses all the tests hosted at St George’s Park and Kingsmead since readmission in 1991. Pitches are unlikely to change markedly in that relatively short time while SA relied on fast bowlers then as they do now.

So, what has changed? This: it’s not on top, it’s inside. On top of the playing surface, that is. And inside the players’ heads.

Hilbert Smit, for years the man behind Centurion’s pitches, agreed: “That’s so true, but how do you prove it?”

Cricketers, he said, saw little in a surface except what they wanted to see.

“If there’s a blade of grass they say it’s going to favour the bowlers too much. So you have to cut the grass off. Then they play on nothing, and they score 600/6 - and that’s also your fault as the groundsman.”

Bowlers, meanwhile, were still second-class citizens.

“Most of the people who are coaches and managers were batsmen as players, and they are very unfair on what the bowlers need,” Smit said.

But the proof of any pitch was not in the pondering but in the players and their performances.

“If you have a good team, you will win in any conditions,” Smit said. “If Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne are in the other team, how do you prepare a pitch to counter both of them?

“In any case, any conditions you create are only going to be a factor for the first day-and-a-half at most. After that, the pitch will play like it always does later in a match.”

And there is always the danger of attempts at botanical engineering backfiring. As evidence, Smit held up the example of Mitchell Johnson’s match haul of 12/127 at Centurion in February, the spark for the mustachioed marauder’s sizzling series stats of 22 wickets at an average of 17.36.

“We played into the Aussies’ hands, and because of that we got blown away by one bowler,” Smit said. “It’s the first time that we have been outplayed at Centurion.”

Indeed, the match was SA’s second loss in the 20 tests played at a ground where they have won 15.

Not that SA’s players are alone in thinking too much before they have had a chance to do anything. On Thursday, the day before the start of the third test at Newlands, West Indies captain Denesh Ramdin said with a splinter of worry in his eye that the pitch “looks green and hard”. Then he reminded himself that “it’s always a good wicket here; the last match played here, a lot of runs were scored”.

That was the test against Australia in March, when 1349 runs flowed in 403 overs at the cost of 32 wickets, an average score per batsman of 42.16 and a runrate of 3.35.

And that is a lot, whichever way you spin it.

So, what did Vernon Philander think of the pitch the day before the third test?

“I haven’t looked at it,” Philander said. “To us, it doesn’t really matter.”

Damn straight, and about time.