After the second Test between India and South Africa ended in two days, former India cricketer, Aakash Chopra on his YouTube channel said that “a bad pitch should be called bad, whether it is ours or someone else’s.”
The visitors won the second and final Test match of the two-match series by seven wickets on Thursday. With this victory, Rohit Sharma became the only Indian skipper to win a Test match at Wanders, Cape Town in the history of cricket. After the game, while speaking on his channel, Aakash agreed with Rohit that pitches around the world should be rated using the same criteria.
“The big question is what is right and what is wrong. Rohit said no one should talk about the pitch and that the match referees should watch properly because if you felt the World Cup final pitch was bad, what sort of pitch was this? He is right,” the commentator asserted.
“My thinking is – Is this pitch right? Are the one-and-a-half to two-day-match turners prepared in India right? We are trying to justify one extreme with another. The truth is neither this nor that is right. A bad pitch should be called bad, whether it is ours or someone else’s,” the former right-hand batter added.
“Let’s be honest, you cannot justify in any way that these are good pitches, whether it is Cape Town, Wanderers, Perth, Ahmedabad, Indore or Delhi. These are not even challenging wickets, they are luck-based pitches,” the former India opener concluded.
In the end, Aakash emphasised that there isn’t much excitement left in Test cricket in all likelihood, with South Africa sending a second-string team to New Zealand and Pakistan resting Shaheen Shah Afridi in the final Test against Australia. He believes that if the games are not played on good pitches, interest would decline even further.
