Spark
Global Moderator
An excellent piece from (who else but?) Gideon Haigh today, touching on something that I've been thinking for a while (esp with regard to the subcontinent). Namely, that home ground advantage ain't what it used to be:
Cookies must be enabled. | The Australian
Cookies must be enabled. | The Australian
This has the hallmarks of an epochal change. Consider that for the first 130 years of Test cricket, Australia lost at home only to England, West Indies and one stray series by the odd Test to New Zealand.
Consider, too, that Pakistan did not lose a home series for its first 40 years in Test cricket, and that West Indies in their period of supremacy did not lose in the Caribbean for more than two decades.
Third-country umpires came along 20 years ago to eliminate one long-standing ground of complaints about favouritism, while the advent of referees curbed some excesses in pitch preparation.
But these developments were more obviously offset by the relative brevity of tours: the fact that teams often undertook Test matches with the bare minimum of preparation.
So what has happened in the past five years? There is nothing like seeing something done for the first time. In hindsight, the back-to-back series between Australia and South Africa in 2008-09 gave a glimpse of the possible, each team beating the other convincingly on their own soil.