While it is unlikely that the pitch will last less than three days, it is also an issue of pride for the staging association to dish out a good pitch.
As the Jharkhand State Cricket Association International Stadium readies itself to host its first ever Test, its curator Shyam Bahadur Singh was the most sought after on Tuesday, two days prior to the start of the match.
He was lecturing on the nuances of what goes into the preparation of the pitch, its technical aspects and the soil-clay mix separately to the visiting Australian journalists as Steve Smith and Co. were going through their practice drills. Singh may not have been aware of a section of the Australian media claiming that the visitng team feared the surface might be worse than Pune.
While it is unlikely that the pitch will last less than three days, it is also an issue of pride for the staging association to dish out a good pitch.
Looking from close quarters, the pitch was not full of cracks as feared by the Australians. Though there was grass on it, it was dry, perhaps more to bind the surface. And, one of the groundsmen was watering the pitch even as the sun beat down harshly.
This, Singh said, was to compensate for the evaporation of water due to the heat, the transpiration rate being 3 per cent.
"This is mainly to moisten the pitch," Singh said as he explained the intricacies that went into pitch preparation and the types of soils that changed its behaviour across various pitches.
Ask Singh if it will last four or five days and he says one could perceive it the way he wants. But, he assures that he has kept two "stepney pitches ready adjacent to the main surface so that in the event of any mishap, he can shift the pitch in an hour as per the BCCI and ICC norms".
For the record, except for Pune, the three other new Test centres were true Test pitches with Rajkot and Visakhapatnam (against England) playing for five days and the Indore game (against New Zealand) lasting four days.
Asked if the Test will last five days, India's chief coach Anil Kumble said: "I don't know. We only hope we will win. How many days the Test will last, I wouldn't know. But I only hope there will be a result and it will be in our favour."
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