By Shamik Chakrabarty in Guwahati
It’s only the second session of the second Test, but if morning shows the day, the pitch at the ACA Stadium in Guwahati is going to pass the test with flying colours. “Good pitch, a proper Test-match pitch,” a former India cricketer here for the game opined during a private conversation in a drinks break.
Sample this. In the 45th over, Ravindra Jadeja bowled a conventional left-arm orthodox delivery to Temba Bavuma. The South Africa captain attempted a sweep, missed it, and was hit on the back leg. Jadeja was adamant that despite bowling from a little wide of the crease, the ball had turned enough to go on and hit the stumps. The on-field umpire begged to differ, but India decided to go upstairs. Ball-tracking showed that it would have missed leg, the ball going with the angle. A week ago, on a square turner at Eden Gardens, Bavuma would have been a sitting duck.
Pitch-wise, the biggest difference between the first Test and the second is that here the bounce is true and batsmen can leave the ball on length. A delivery jumped in Washington Sundar’s first over, but that was down to the moisture on the pitch. It was still the first session.
In the second session, a Mohammed Siraj delivery from the Pavilion End kept a little low, but those were aberrations. The consensus here is that spin will come into play from Day Three onwards. That’s how it should be in the game’s purest format. India shot themselves in the foot by opting for a lottery pitch at Eden.
Guwahati has been hosting its first-ever Test and the opening day saw a decent turnout – in excess of 15,000 by 1 pm. A poor deck would have been a bad start. Efforts were made to ensure that a good surface was prepared, and the way things have been going, the curators have done a decent job.
As BCCI secretary Devajit Saikia said in an exclusive interview with RevSportz, the effort to bring Test cricket to this part of the world started in 2019, when Jay Shah was the cricket board secretary. “I have to thank Mr Jay Shah (current ICC chair), who was the secretary of the BCCI when we first made the attempt to have a Test match in Guwahati. That was—we have to go back to the year 2019, in the month of June-July. We first made the request to the BCCI to allow us to host a Test match in Guwahati,” Saikia told this website.
India’s 30th Test centre has made a bright start.
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