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ShareJudging by the look of the Mohali pitch, neither team can take the 20 wickets for a win
The Mohali Test is following the Bangalore pattern of batsmen dominating bowlers on a placid wicket. The fall of Sachin Tendulkar in the dying minutes, just like Zaheer Khan's last ball wicket at the end of the first day in Bangalore, restored some parity, but the Indians are well on course to cross 400.
Sehwag, Dravid and Laxman must be kicking themselves for missing out on such easy runs, and Tendulkar and Gambhir for failing to score centuries like Ponting and Hussey did in Bangalore. That leaves the retiring Dada to build on his unbeaten half century, and then thank the Mohali curator for laying out a batting eden.
But then what? We have seen in recent Mohali Tests that the pitch gets slower as the match progresses, making it harder and harder to take wickets. Four of the last seven Test matches have been drawn on this ground.
Ishant Sharma may get a little more bounce than he did in Bangalore, but Zaheer Khan is unlikely to enjoy the kind of reverse swing that was on offer after the ball got scuffed up on the not-so-lush Bangalore ground. Besides, by going into the match with only two seamers, India will quickly run out of steam.
That leaves the spinners. Harbhajan Singh got just three wickets in all in the Bangalore Test, and that was a pitch more conducive to spin because of its cracks. The kind of ball with which he got Hussey in the second innings, hitting a crack and turning in from outside the left hander's off-stump, is not likely to happen in Mohali.
The only unknown factor is Amit Mishra. Having seen the guile with which he bowled in the IPL, Mishra is certainly a great prospect for India. But it's a pity he got his debut on such a dead Mohali track, rather than in the next Test in Delhi's Ferozeshah Kotla which still has the kind of hard, abrasive surface that suits our spinners.
Mohali in particular has given no joy to spinners in recent times. It does get dusty on the fourth and fifth day, but the batsman can easily negotiate a spinner on the backfoot with all the life sucked out of the pitch by then. So Mishra might as well save his googlies for more conducive conditions instead of exposing all his tricks to the Aussies.
What beats me is that there is apparently no shortage of money being spent on the pitches, going by the number of pitch experts we hire from New Zealand, and the number of pitch committees we set up. The current chief selector headed one of those. So is this the result of all that planning and expenditure?
I would be happy to be proven wrong, but barring a hara-kiri by the batsmen from either side, I can't see how this match can be won. So that leaves only the batting averages and milestones for the statisticians to drool over in this match. For the rest of us, it might be more fun to switch to a news channel to see how the Obama-McCain contest is unfolding.
