T20 World Cup 2024 – Will New York pitches remain raw for India vs Pakistan?

On paper, the primetime Saturday night match between India and Pakistan this coming early Sunday morning New York time doesn’t really matter. The loser should be able to win the other matches comfortably and progress to the next round. Next-round opponents will be assigned based on pre-tournament seeding, so coming out on top of the group doesn’t really matter either.

And yet the success of the first half of this ambitious tournament hinges on this match. At its best, the India-Pakistan match makes up for the more predictable parts of a cricket tournament. The match generates revenue that partially guarantees the expansion of the game. The match gives the ICC the confidence to play 20 teams in a World Cup of a notoriously snobby sport. The match gives them the confidence to risk moving the match to the United States, a country where the time zone is inconvenient for existing fans and fans are limited to expats.

If the ICC isn’t nervous about Sunday’s matches after the three matches (including the warm-up) played at the temporary Nassau County International Cricket Stadium, then it is treating India-Pakistan as a cheat code to mask all other shortcomings. Had these matches been played at existing stadiums, they would have faced heavy sanctions from the ICC.

There was too much seam movement, too much bounce and yet too much variability, which cast a huge gloom over the weekend. The ICC is right to recommend standard conditions for a limited-overs World Cup. This goes beyond simply prioritising big hits. In standard conditions, most skills can be executed and the match is evenly matched.

This is also the concept behind T20, the sport’s biggest expansion vehicle: you want your batsmen to show their skill and score runs, but you don’t want to see them fumbling, ducking and squirming and failing to get more than 96 runs batting first, as they have done in the two matches so far.

These situations are by no means the norm. After two consecutive outs against Ireland on Wednesday, Arshdeep Singh tried to bowl a cross-seam delivery but the ball kept moving. Andy Flower was not exaggerating when he said the delivery was on the edge of danger. Harry Tector, Rohit Sharma and Rishabh Pant were all hit as the ball bounced in unexpected ways.

The drop-in pitch ended up in such a state because it was poorly prepared and there was no time to get used to it. Normally, when a cricket stadium broadcasts matches on its main square, it plays 10-12 junior cricket matches, then senior domestic cricket matches, before playing international cricket. Here, pitch No. 1 was used for the first time. Sri Lanka came out to bat and were bowled out for 77, leaving South Africa sweating their chase. The pitch where Ireland were all out for 96 against India was used only for the second time.

There are several possible reasons why the pitch was not adequately prepared. It was cold, raining, and snowing in New York when the pitch was shipped from Australia. The pitch was transported to Florida to be fully prepared, and then shipped to New York.

Even if the weather in New York had been great and the stadium ready, it is unlikely that the ICC would have budgeted for a break-in period. Only nine matches, including warm-up games, were permitted in that period. So how could the ICC have anticipated a break-in period even if the stadium had been properly prepared?

The stadium was handed over to the ICC almost a day before India’s warm-up match against Bangladesh. India sent half their team to the US early to ensure they were well prepared for the tournament, but let alone train at the ground, when captain Rohit Sharma and coach Rahul Dravid tried to see the ground and pitch, they were turned away because the ground had not yet been handed over. Getting the stadium ready in three months for the biggest match of the year is not as much of a boast as the ICC thinks it should be.

There’s not much that can be done now. India have shown their bowling prowess on this pitch and Pakistan only bring in quicker bowlers with higher release points, which poses an even bigger challenge for the batsmen. They have already tried pitches at No. 1 and No. 4. Six pitches at the Canthiag Park training facility, about 20 minutes away from the ground, have also developed over the same period and proved just as challenging – so challenging that South African batsmen refused to bat there against Anrich Nortje and Kagiso Rabada. Local net bowlers frequently hit the batsmen due to the seam movement and variability in bounce.

So what are the chances that the remaining pitches nos. 2 and 3 will be different? For reference, the Netherlands vs. South Africa match is likely to be played on one of the two central pitches, followed by India vs. Pakistan the next day. We saw in the India vs. Ireland match that the pitch used does not necessarily mean a fixed pitch, but it will not be an entirely new pitch.

Perhaps the toss advantage will be balanced by their two menacing bowling attacks, and perhaps we might see a close, low-scoring contest, but even if a low-scoring, thrilling match does materialise, it is unlikely that the ICC’s commercial partners will be happy with it.

It’s not just the action on the field that’s less than ideal. It’s odd to see empty stands at India’s matches, even against Ireland. The stands on both sides were full, but the hospitality stands, which offer a frontal view of the action, were sparsely populated. It’s quite likely that the ICC has set the prices to discourage people from coming to some of these matches. Some packages for the India vs Pakistan match can cost as much as $10,000, and who knows if they’ll be full on Sunday morning.

There used to be a joke that if you named two bulls India and Pakistan, people would still watch them fight. Perhaps it’s true to some extent. Who knows? With a shared bloody history, longing among displaced people and the constant threat of war throughout the existence of both countries, India and Pakistan find a sense of liberation by playing cricket, permission to express emotions and feelings that they cannot express in any other way: anger, pettiness, love and sporting etiquette.

The ICC should be commended for fielding 20 teams in this World Cup. The idea of ​​hosting it in a new venue, in the capital of global capitalism, is noble as well. But the execution of the idea makes one wonder whether it has taken the sentiments of India and Pakistan for granted.