Sunil Gavaskar believes bouncy tracks in IPL exposed Ranji Trophy ‘dadas’

Indian domestic cricket, in last one decade or so, has become very uni-dimensional and the home teams, in order to control the advantage, have had adopted mostly three strategies - prepare out and out turner, or flat-bed, or green tops. While the first and third have seen matches ending in even one and half days, there have been very few definitive results on flat Indian wickets.

However, teams have often steered clear of preparing bouncy tracks so as to lessen the potential disadvantage that may haunt them. While that worked in the team’s favour in domestic competitions, it also resulted in players have often been reduced to a one-trick pony at the bigger stages like IPL or at the international level and Gavaskar lashed out the cricketers for the same.

“The pitches for this IPL have been terrific and BCCI needs to be complimented for providing pitches where the ball has not turned from ball one and where it has come on to the bat nicely with a true bounce and where the batsmen can play on the rise without too much worry about sideways movement,” Gavaskar wrote in Times of India.

“Unfortunately, the extra bounce has also found out some of the Ranji Trophy ‘dadas’ who have floundered against the short ball and with some of them being India prospects, it doesn’t augur well especially for the tour later in the year to Australia where the bounce will be even more.”

Gavaskar stressed on the fact that T20 cricket offers a lot of opportunities for the batsmen to step away and hit bowlers out of the park more often than not. But, Indian batsmen, apart from few, have struggled to counter bouncers big-time.

“The T20 format does give the batsman a license to step away and look for the big shots, but the experienced watcher knows which is a genuine attempt to accelerate the scoring and which is a cop out against the fast bowlers,” he said.