Cracks are not what makes a pitch dangerous

Commentators point the camera at a dry surface splitting open, and the deliveries that actually misbehave have nothing to do with it.

On the fourth morning somebody puts a close up of a crack on the screen and says the word minefield. It makes for good television. It is mostly wrong, and the reason is that a crack is a small target that the ball hits rarely, while the thing that produces genuinely unplayable deliveries is the state of the soil either side of it.

A pitch is clay, rolled and dried. The clay content determines how hard it binds, which determines whether the surface stays intact under a fast bowler's follow through and under a spinner's ball landing on the same spot forty times. When the binding is good, a crack is cosmetic. The ball may hit it once an hour and jump, which is dramatic and essentially random.

When the binding is poor, the surface starts to shed. Not crack, shed. Small quantities of dried material lift away where balls have landed, and a shallow scuffed area develops that is softer and lower than the ground around it. That is what makes a ball keep low, and it is what makes a delivery grip and turn viciously, and it is nearly invisible on television because it has no shadow.

The distinction matters because it changes what a curator can actually control. Cracking is a function of drying and you cannot stop a pitch drying in the sun. Binding is a function of the soil, the rolling schedule and the moisture at the time of preparation, and it is entirely within a groundsman's power.

So when a surface is criticised after a low scoring match, the useful question is not why did it crack. It is whether the clay was right and whether it was rolled enough in the weeks before, and the answer is often that a venue used a soil profile it inherited rather than one it chose.

I have a small heresy here. I do not think deteriorating pitches are bad for the game and I would rather watch a surface with something in it than a flat one, provided the deterioration is gradual and predictable rather than sudden.

Gradual and predictable is the standard. A pitch that misbehaves on day four has done its job. One that misbehaves on day one was made badly, and no amount of camera work on a crack will change that.