Evenly grassed, green in places, not exactly treacherous: Australia’s practice pitches in Bengaluru belied first impressions to offer increasing amounts of turn ahead of next week’s Test match showdown with India.
As Usman Khawaja travelled a day late out of Melbourne after finally having his visa approved, the rest of the Australian squad ventured to their training base in the south of India ahead of the first Test in Nagpur next week.
Australia’s training base in Bengaluru.Credit:Bharat Sundaresan
There they met two of a quartet of handpicked net bowlers, drawn from first-class and club cricket and requisitioned by Cricket Australia for the task of helping the touring batters tighten their defences against the likes of R Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja and Axar Patel.
They found that, despite initial appearances, two of the practice pitches did offer some turn – more may be forthcoming as the training camp continues.
Critically, the Australians need plenty of sighters of the “slide spin” deliveries that arrow threateningly into pads and stumps – from Ashwin to the left-handers and Jadeja and Axar to the right-handers.
“I think the new ball is the one that creates more of that slide and when the batters do get done on the inside … we’re preparing for that,” head coach Andrew McDonald said before departure.
“That slide spin, we’ll expect the spinners to bowl early against our opening batters as well with the new ball so all that is taken care of in the training environment and Diva [Michael Di Venuto] does a fantastic job in preparing. The key to success there is to have a clear method and that will be individually based and depending on the conditions we’re confronted with.”
In 2017, the Australian touring party camped at the ICC academy in Dubai, where they prepared on bespoke pitches against a selection of UAE-based net bowlers called in for the purpose. McDonald admitted that neither the left-arm spinner Ashton Agar nor assistant coach Dan Vettori offered the same angles of attack as India’s spinners.
“We’ll be trying to make sure the batters are clear on their method,” he said. “You’re never going to get exactly the same as you’re going to get in a game, and that’s one of the real complexities around preparing for a cricket tour.”
Either way, Australia’s planners have no regrets about dispensing with traditional tour matches, having not played any since the 2019 Ashes tour. Instead, they are backing an experienced squad to be fresher come the fourth Test of the series than had been the case in 2017.
“We haven’t played a tour game, for three years. It’s probably not something new to us, put it that way,” McDonald said. “We value freshness at the back end of the tour. Something we’ve seen teams go there before and expend a lot of energy at the front end. We feel with the profile of this group, quite an experienced group, quite an experienced batting unit as well, who have been there before, I think 11 out of the squad has been there before.
“A significant chunk of the squad that’s been there before, so we feel that better places them leading in and then you never get guarantees over those practice game surfaces you get. Often, there’s no real connection between that practice game into the first Test match. We feel as though we can control the surfaces here.
“Get a bit more control in Bangalore to replicate what we’re going to come up against and then we go into Nagpur fresh and hopefully it pays dividends at the back end.”
Freshness was one word to describe the training pitches, which were far less scarred than the surface cooked up for a pair of training sessions in North Sydney before the team departed. This won’t be easy.
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