If a pitch actually ever does that, then call it a bad pitch. The Nagpur pitch behaved more or less the same across all 3 days. I've said this before, but writing off a pitch as being poor because it may have broken up in the future is ridiculous. The match ended on Day 3, it's irrelevant how the pitch would have behaved on Day 4.
Yeah wasn't speaking about the Nagpur pitch. The reason why it was crap was because it was so bad that it made batting any length of time obscenely difficult.
Why is it a bad thing if either batsmen or bowlers have to struggle? This is Test cricket after all, is it not?
I don't like surfaces where conditions are stacked massively in favour of either, as I think it reduces the quality of the cricket on offer. I actually think that conditions at Adelaide were really poor too. Sure it was an exciting match in the sense that it was very close throughout, but when you see Doug Bracewell's strategy of walking across his stumps and wogging the ball over deep backward square yielding better results than Kane Williamson doing his damndest to play a proper test innings, then I don't think the balance was right.
If we didn't have conditions heavily stacked in favour of one discipline over the other, we wouldn't have so many ATG performances - Gavaskar's 96, Clarke's 151, the Pakistani bowlers hooping the old ball miles on their dead home tracks, etc etc.
It's one thing having challenging conditions, and quite another having conditions where a 40 may as well be 100.
Where are you drawing the line? What's the minimum highest score that needs to be achieved on a pitch before you call it good? Are we absolving the batsmen of all culpability here and saying that any pitch on which neither side's batsmen cross 'X' amount of runs is now a poor pitch? What's the equivalent standard for bowling figures?
81 and 4/75.
Seriously though, if you like conditions where batting through a session is as difficult as batting through a day usually would be then fine. I personally think it encourages reckless cricket and punishes good batting.
If a pitch actually was unpredictable to the extent where conventional batting wisdom stopped applying and the soundest strategy would actually be to just hit out till you get out, then I would agree that such a pitch is poor. But as Vijay, Amla, Faf, Dhawan all demonstrated at Nagpur, that clearly wasn't the case there. Batting was bloody difficult, but still possible. Good techniques and good mindsets were still rewarded. You just had to be prepared to score a 2 RPO and not 3, and had to settle for a par score in the 200s and not 300+ as we have all become accustomed to. And honestly I see nothing wrong with that at all.
Until something like this comes along to undo all the hard work.
As any pitch ever been rated as poor for offering excessive seam movement to quick bowlers? Only seems like turning pitches or flat pitches get reported.
Only four test pitches (including Nagpur) have been reported thus far since pitch monitoring process came into effect.
Both true. It's obviously harsh on Faf but it wasn't an impossible delivery. You've got to be willing to cut out a few of your horizontal bat shots to give yourself the best chance to survive the ones which keep low. Best example : Dravid at Sabina 06.