Cape Town pitch turns batting into a lottery

There is never an off season for dad jokes, but they tend to thrive around New Year's time.

December 31: See you next year.

January 1: It happened last year, but feels like only yesterday.

January 3 in Cape Town: It was three innings ago but feels like this morning.

The pitches this series is being played on have also been a bit of a joke. Something tends to happen to South African pitches when India are visiting. In 2017-18, the home captain Faf du Plessis openly chided the groundsmen to an extent that they went extreme by the final Test. It was so extreme the home batters didn't want to complete the Test on it.

Here we are again with two successive pitches taking the balance between bat and ball so far out of whack that batters are considering running byes with the ball in the wicketkeeper's hands. Not a specialist batter batting with a tailender, but an opener with a No. 3. Runs are so precious, survival so improbable, that Rohit Sharma, one of the four batters out of 26 on day one to go past 20, decided he might as well bat like it is an ODI and get some runs before the one with his name on it arrives.

We know the mayhem 23 wickets in one day in Asia would create. You don't even have to imagine: just look at the kind of responses three-day finishes on turning tracks bring. Shaun Pollock, former South Africa captain, was fairly critical of the pitches being rolled out in South Africa, but all eyes will be on the ICC match referee Chris Broad.

A similar pitch, according to Mohammed Siraj, but a quicker one, according to Dean Elgar, exacerbated the difficulties of batting as, unlike Centurion, there were hardly any dropped catches. Errors with the bat resulted in wickets more frequently. As India collapsed from 153 for 4 to 153 all out, all the talk about building up to wickets and scoreboard pressure sounded like an elaborate scam.

Apart from Kagiso Rabada, South Africa bowlers had been loose, they had hardly any runs on the board to create pressure, they couldn't afford catching men, and yet out of nowhere appeared unplayable balls. That is exactly what you don't want to see happening in Test cricket: a bowler taking three wickets in an over after going for 30 in his first five, not because batters are wafting around, but because the ball is doing all sorts both horizontally and vertically.

If these pitches are being rolled out on the home team's instructions, you have to question the wisdom behind it. Cold data on the amount of seam movement and uneven bounce these two teams generate in South Africa unequivocally says India struggle to keep up with the hosts once the effects of the newness of the ball starts to wear off. In Centurion, India drew more false responses out of the batters and more movement out of the pitch in the first 20 overs than South Africa, but as the ball got older, the taller bowlers had their say.

In making the pitch so heavily loaded in favour of the ball, the groundsmen made sure India's natural weakness in these conditions was eliminated. India bowled South Africa out in 23.2 overs. There was no question of how to draw movement with the older ball.

Apart from a couple of changes to left-hand batters - moving around the wicket sooner and placing a short leg so that they can bowl straighter and deny them the width - India didn't bowl differently to Centurion. There they just kept going past the bat; here they kept finding the edge, and the edges kept finding the fielders.

Nobody would have predicted 23 wickets would fall on the first day, but India did most things right for these conditions. They reinforced their four-quicks formation by replacing Shardul Thakur with a Vernon Philander-like seam bowler on a Vernon Philander-like pitch. Mukesh Kumar was the most difficult bowler to leave, drew massive amounts of movement because of his upright seam, and took four wickets in 8.2 overs.

Like in Centurion, India were collectively more accurate with the ball in the earlier exchanges. Here, though, the good-length balls kept taking edges. Perhaps the little more pace in the pitch gave batters a little less time to adjust to the movement off the pitch. Just the break they needed.

With the bat, India left balls better, but also attacked anything remotely loose. Despite leaving alone more balls - 37 in 34.5 overs to South Africa's 35 in 40.2 overs - India made more boundary attempts: 35 to 32. And India's attacking shots were better decisions. Only six of their boundary attempts were false responses to South Africa's 14, which ended up in four wickets. Or, in other words, the South Africa bowlers conceded more risk-free runs.

Despite that 6 for 0 collapse restricting India's lead, that is still the camp you would want to be in with 36 runs in the bag and three second-innings wickets already taken. Then again, it is hard to say anything on this lottery of a pitch.