by sussexpob » Mon Nov 07, 2016 1:34 pm
Indian pitches for me change not long after 2000's series. The aforementioned Jayasuriya 300 game (and series) was played in Colombo, so not really relevant. In the 1990's the pitches in India were slow and low, occasionally spun, but most teams picked spinners on reputation and the fact that seamers got little. But for batsman, it was still hard to score because of the pace in the pitch, in fact if I had to compare a pitch in those days the Nagpur pitch in the last England series largely sums it up, with the 1 out of 3/4 pitches breaking up and really spinning.
Looking at the figures, India score big runs vs England in 1993, but in tests where Ian Salisbury and Graeme Hick bowl 60 overs in an innnings (500 seems incredibly undervalued, even on the most spin friendly pitch possible), they score 600 vs Australia in 1998 but the scorecard indicates that the Aussie team bus carrying their world class bowlers crashed on the way to the ground, its a C team line up with Shane Warne (Greg Blewitt, a number 3 bat and very part time medium pace, is seemingly picked as a specialist seamer, just to give you an indication).... and they pumell Zimbabwe and a Sri Lanka team yet to win a test match.
In games against Windies, they average exactly on the historical innings value for the home team since 1932. And they average well below vs Pakistan and South Africa.
Essentially, when they play decent bowlers, low scores or average scores seemed pretty normal. The overall decade score is up on history, but then at no other point in history did India have such a massive depth of world class batsman.
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And a hat and bra to you too, my good sirs!