Pitch news from Kotla: Waiting for instructions

Five days before the final Test match, the word on the wicket from the Feroz Shah Kotla is that the groundstaff is waiting to be told when to water and when to roll the 22 yards on which the fourth and final Test will be played.

Instructions are awaited from Daljeet Singh, the BCCI’s chief curator, who will set foot at the Kotla over the weekend.

The centre-wicket can be altered to turn spin-friendly from early in the first session on Day One. But for that to happen it will have to be kept dry for at least five days. A day of bright sunshine; Thursday and Friday was gloomy, will help sap out moisture.

No wonder then that the ground staff had one eye on the skies. The prediction of rain on a weather app forced the ground staff at the Feroz Shah Kotla to drag the covers on over the past two days. Curator Ankit Datta was supervising the men.

Given the nature of the turning tracks in Mohali and Nagpur, the focus of attention, will be on the wicket at the Feroz Shah Kotla. However, with the onset of winter, the fast bowlers should get assistance during the early part of the first session, even if the team management calls for an outright spinner-friendly track.

Former Test opener and chairman of the DDCA pitch committee Chetan Chauhan promised to ‘produce a good Test match wicket.’ “Quoting what Sunil Gavaskar was saying on the television… it should be a wicket that will favour not just one department but it will be one which will help both batsmen and bowlers,” Chauhan claimed.

But a glance at the scorecard of the last Test match played at the Kotla, in March 2013, shows that it finished in three days. A total of 856 runs were scored by India and Australia. The spinners — R Ashwin, Pragyan Ojha and Ravindra Jadeja combined to scalp eight in the first innings and nine in the second. Yet, going by the nature of the matches during the Ranji Trophy season, none of these tracks can be termed as rank-turners or as under-prepared. Bengal posted 357 after being asked to bat in late October.

However, a DDCA official said that the nature of the pitch during the Ranji Trophy and what will be rolled out for the Test match can be vastly different.

There are nine wickets at the Kotla, and all of them have been used this season for various matches, including trials.

In all, four Ranji Trophy Games have been played at the stadium this season, three of them resulted in outright wins. On the centre wicket, likely to be used for the fourth Test, both matches produced outright wins.