[Richard]

It does usually go on in England, and rightly so. Preparing a pitch to suit the home team isn't doctoring, doctoring is illegally altering the condition of the pitch during the course of the match.

Anyway if there's no effort made to ensure The Oval is a result pitch it'll be plain stupidity on the part of whoever made the choice (be it Surrey or someone at the ECB). There is, admittedly, a limit to what can be done - it's quite tricky to suppress a rank road - but you have to try, when for your home team a draw is a loss.