bigfluffylemon wrote:Unstoppable at home. Sh1te outside the subcontinent when the ball moves around.
Such an assessment might be true, had those batsman they faced in these away series put masses of runs on the board, but this is quite frankly not true. If you compare all the players who played in the relative top 6's this summer:-
Dhawan out performs Jennings....
Cook out performed Rahul...
Pujara out performed Root..
Kohli blasted Bairstow out the water...
Rahane marginally performed better than Stokes...
Moeen was slightly better than Pant....
The best of the rest, Pope/Malan v Vijay/Pandaya goes to India...
Generally, the top 6 battle were prime batsman v front line bowlers, fell Indias way, and when taking into account Kohli/Pujara's margin of victories v their opposite numbers (especially when the series was alive, as Root and Cook only scored in the dead rubber 5th test), its actually very favourable to India. England won the series on the abnormality of having a batting line up so deep. They got a century from a player at 8 with more first class 100s than 4 of the current Australian batting line up.
This shows that its not exactly India's poor art in these conditions that leads to such disastrous results. The home batsman playing in such conditions were also cruelly exposed even with (in some cases) 100s of FC games of experience in playing the moving ball. This is no accident. The summer was abnormally hot and had lasted from April, many places in the country were in drought and hadnt had sustained rain in 3-4 months, yet pitches were green and the ball swung all over the place. England tailored the pitches to favour their deeper batting and advantages in the pace attack, probably knowing scores would be low. England scored far more runs when the ball got old and stopped moving for India, I think that was the game plan.
Its hardly isolated either. South Africa's last home series earlier in the year, they scored just over 300 once, in six innings. One pitch so heavily favoured the bowlers, there was open talk in the press of the match being abandoned due to the state of the pitch being dangerous. Home teams dont want to produce batting wickets, because they probably know India would bat them to oblivion in such conditions, so they go the other way. They produce pitches that are low scoring to take the Indians better batsman out, and bring their own pace attacks in, while nullifying the spinners.
Its usually at this stage everyone starts to fault Indian pitches for being bunsens that turn and rage for 5 days, and are similarly setup for home victories, but I dont think this is true. When Australia toured last, Dharamsala had a bit of pace and bounce about it. Bengalaru had variable bounce and a bit of spin. Pune was a good old fashioned slow, low turner, but not a rager (India got hammered by Aus), and Ranchi rewarded good batting, as can be seen by MArsh and Handscomb mammoth effort to save the test at the end. No real stereotypical pitch.
Fact is, if home teams want to beat India, they have to produce pitches like they do. And these pitches will continually make all who bat on them look bad. I doubt many teams would be able to stop India, had they produced pitches similar to a few years ago. But nowadays tactics is to make it as hard as possible, so I expect the trend to continue.
Australia made the pitches pretty batting friendly a few years back for India's last tour.... they lost two tests which could have gone either way by memory (one by a handful of runs, the other by a few wickets). Will be interesting to see if Australia, with their non-existent batting line up now, decide to do that again. I have a feeling we suddenly might see a resurgence of quality bowling pitches all of a sudden.
All and all, it seems test cricket when India tour a country, is a lot like what England footballers used to face when going to play Lithuania.... the pitch hasnt been cut on purpose, stopping teams from quick and precise passing on the ground, and trying to take the game into a bit of a war where certain advantages of skills are nullified. Its a tactic that tends to work.