India vs England: Why Ranchi pitch might not behave the way England think | Cricket News

Like a pair of inquisitive sleuths on a crime scene, Brendon McCullum and Jonny Bairstow squeezed through the ropes strung around the 22-yard strip and devoted the next 20 minutes deducing its nature. The duo bent, kneeled and craned their necks, probing the surface from every possible angle. Joe Root and Ollie Pope, too, joined them in their forensic examination, even as the two national curators and the local counterpart watched bemusedly from their pitch-side perch.
What intrigued the Englishmen, Pope would confess later, was the two-faced appearance of the surface. One half of the pitch, when viewed vertically, is smattered with spots of dry grass; the other half is bald and brown, with “platey” cracks.“The top layer looked crusty. The cracks in the wicket aren’t just cracks, there are separate bits of ground that could open up with a lot of sun on them. The ball could deviate more off them if they open up like we expect them to,” he would detail his assessment of the surface.
None of the decks in this series has been a rank turner. Typically, the pitch would be mostly true for the first two days, before it begins to deteriorate, offer turn, albeit slow, and invariable bounce. But Pope, and England fear that Ranchi would be the one India might look to tw the knife and serve up a spiteful turner.
England’s Ollie Pope during a press conference ahead of the fourth Test cricket match between India and England, at the JSCA International Stadium Complex, in Ranchi, Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2024. (PTI Photo)
One reason, Pope feels the hosts would seek the extreme, is the absence of Jasprit Bumrah, who terrorised the English batsmen more than the spinners did, and is the leading wicket-taker of the series. “With Japsrit missing the Test, they could go down the avenue (of dishing out a turner and unleashing four spinners),” he notes.
He offers a more scientific reason too. “When we looked at the pitch, it was recently watered and mo. It was kept under the sun too. So it won’t be a belter for sure,” he says. Selective watering and exposure to sunlight—the sun is more benign than harsh—could accelerate the cracking up process. The grass, more grey than green, is kept to bind the surface from not breaking up prematurely. “It depends on what India want, how they see it, if they want to leave a bit of grass on it, or shave it off. There is every chance they would do that (shave off the grass).”
Ranchi’s googly
It’s not the first time that the appearance of the Ranchi surface has spooked a traveling side. Back in 2017, the Australians fumed when they cast their eyes on the surface, which looked fearfully dark. But the supposed crack-laden pitch, “prepared of soil from Mars”, as an Australian daily put out, played just fine and produced a thrilling draw. The surface held up, the turn was slow, and there was some assance for fast bowlers in the first hour of Days 1 and 2.

The sinerness of the pitch owed to the peculiar nature of the black soil here, which when watered assumes a deep, dark shade. Black soil is inherently slow in nature, unless it is over-exposed to sun. Batsmen get time to react to the amount of turn. Even when the ball keeps low, an inevitability when the pitch wears, it does not skid as waspishly as clayey red-soil surfaces would.
India’s Mukesh Kumar, Mohammed Siraj and Akash Deep during a practice session ahead of the fourth Test cricket match between India and England, at the JSCA International Stadium Complex, in Ranchi, Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2024. (PTI Photo)
The Test against South Africa in 2019 produced a result. The duration—it lasted three days and a session—could raise eyebrows. But it was not the surface that abetted the visitors’ capitulation, but their own inept batting against India’s pacers Mohammed Shami and Umesh Yadav, who accounted for half of South Africa’s wickets.
Some turn, though, is inevitable. Shubman Gills reminds: “This is India, you expect the ball to turn.” But when the ball begins to turn—and how much it does—is the abiding question. If it turns out to be a rank turner, Pope says, England would not be complaining. “If it does spin from ball one I guess it’s an even playing field. It doesn’t define the result, but it does give you an advantage if you win the toss and bat on the slightly flatter wickets,” he says.

Turners, however, are a double-edge sword for India in the recent past. Earlier this year, India lost to Australia on a pitch that helped spinners.
Meanwhile, India coach Rahul Dravid too moved anxiously around the wicket—perhaps the most ubiquitous image of the series—before he suddenly paused and stared meditatively on something that caught his attention. The curators would converge, lening to what the coach had to tell them and nodding their heads. As soon the coach left, the curators instructed his groundsmen, scattered for lunch, to cover the pitch. They hastily obeyed the orders, wrapping the pitch that has intrigued the English cricketers, perhaps with another layer of potential mystery.