Cricket Australia has encouraged curators shave more grass off, and reduce the moisture in, their pitches this summer as some tweaks have been announced to the Sheffield Shield to try find a better balance between bat and ball.
The struggles of first-class batters have across the country have been in the spotlight after Australia only managed first innings totals of 198 and 210 in the drawn series with Bangladesh.
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After Mackay yielded the third two-day Test in Australia since the beginning of last summer’s Ashes, the plight of spin bowlers has also been a big cause concern with shortened games diminishing the role of tweakers.
It has been a problem at Shield level too with nine of 30 matches last season ending inside three days.
In response, Cricket Australia have tweaked session times in Shield games to try encourage captain’s to bowl more spin and give batters the chance to capitalise on more fatigued bowlers.
The first session will remain at two hours in length, but the middle session between lunch and tea will be extended to two hours and 15 minutes.
While the final session, with the extra half an hour included, will likely be of the same length in order to reach the minimum required overs of 96 in a day.
“What we don’t want to do is make it harder for batting or harder for spin bowlers to get a look into the game,” Peter Roach, CA’s operations and scheduling boss, told cricket.com.au.
“Adding time to the first session didn’t make a lot of sense because certainly on day one, with 22 teams out of 31 last season winning the toss and bowling, it makes the first session longer when the wicket is probably at its hardest for batting.
“When is the easiest time to bat? Certainly, on day one, you would think when the sun is at its highest in the middle of the day and the heat is at its hottest.
“(The extra 15 minutes) might change the way fielding captains think about the way they use their bowlers in that middle session to get through, and it could potentially lead to some more spin overs.
“The key message is we are tweaking rather than blowing things up.
“We’ve got three levers at our disposal: the ball, the pitches, which is at arm’s length because we don’t employ any curators, and the playing conditions. This is a minor tweak to the playing conditions, which we think could assist players in not having that long, laborious two-and-a half-hour last session, but also add a bit of time into the session in the middle where we think batting generally should be at its easiest.”
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Statistically, the last four Shield seasons rank inside the top ten toughest for batters in the last 50 years with averages plummeting.
Last summer, there were 27.42 runs per wicket, the third lowest in the past 50 years.
Cricket Australia does not want to see an increase in draws in four-day games with flatter pitches, but they want to see more matches going down to the wire, bigger scores and more spin.
“We still want results in Shield cricket, we want to see a balance between bat and ball, and that hasn’t changed,” Roach added.
“But the mantra a decade ago was probably ‘if in doubt, lean towards the bowler’. We’re now changing that language to say, ‘if in doubt, we should lean towards the batter’ because conditions are being seen as pretty difficult for batting.
“Curators have all these moments in their preparation when they say, ‘Do I do this? Do I do that?’ We want them – if in doubt whether to thin some grass out, take another millimetre of grass off or give it another roll – to say, ‘OK, I’m going to make my decision leaning on the side of the batter more so than the bowler’.
“It’s a delicate balance and it’s not the same for every ground; we’re not averaging the same number of runs at every ground and we’re not averaging the same number of overs of spin at each ground, and we don’t want to. We want our grounds to be a bit different.
“Across the board, we want results, but we want them to be deep on that last day.
“We want to see teams win the toss and bat a bit more.
“They’re the outcomes, but in the curators’ minds, we’re trying to use the language that we still want a balance, we still want to see fast bowlers have their turn, but we want to see batters have their turn and want to see spinners – that’s a great game for us.
“We want to see pace and bounce; we want to see it spin in Sydney. We’re just making that minor tweak to our language to say, ‘If in doubt, I think we need to lean towards the batter a little bit more in the preparation of pitches’.”
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Roach also confirmed that the injury substitution trial – which allows Shield teams to replace an injured or ill player in the first two days of a match – will continue.
The International Cricket Council is considering introducing a version of the rule to Test cricket – which currently only allows concussion substitutes.
“We think the substitution trial we had last season worked exceedingly well and we’re really happy with it,” Roach said.
“We heard really great feedback from our teams that there were times when they tried to take advantage of it and couldn’t find a way to, which is exactly what we want. We want that team that has the injury to be not massively disadvantaged by the injury, hence the ability to replace. But we don’t want them to get an advantage over the other team either.”
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The Shield’s first innings bonus-point system will also remain in place despite a widely held view that it encourage home teams to produce more sporting surfaces to more easily secure bowling bonus points.
“We don’t think that’s influencing the way teams play as much as maybe the perception is,” Roach said.
“We think the Shield competition is in good shape. The right teams are winning it. The majority of games are played in a really good manner and we think anything we do should be minor.
“Changing the point structure is probably a bit more major, and we just don’t think we’re in that space where we need to.”
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