Drop-in pitches did not remove home advantage, they moved it

Trays of soil grown off-site were supposed to standardise conditions, and instead handed control to a much smaller group of people.

The pitch arrives on a truck. That still feels wrong to a certain kind of purist, and I have some sympathy, but the objection people usually reach for is the wrong one.

The complaint is that drop-in surfaces are bland. Sometimes they are. The more interesting fact is that they are bland by construction, and that the construction is a choice somebody makes months in advance in a nursery you will never see.

A square that lives in the ground takes its character from the soil under it, which nobody chose, and from decades of rolling and watering. A drop-in tray takes its character from a soil recipe. Clay fraction is specified. Depth is specified. The grass is grown into it under controlled irrigation and then it is craned into a stadium that also hosts concerts and another football code. The point of the exercise was never cricket quality. It was stadium utilisation.

Once the surface is a recipe, home advantage does not disappear, it relocates. It stops belonging to the region and starts belonging to whoever writes the specification. A board that wants pace and carry can have it. A board that wants low bounce can have that instead, and can change its mind between series without anyone being able to point at a groundsman and accuse him of anything, because the tray was prepared long before the touring side named a squad.

This is why I think the transparency argument matters more here than at traditional venues. With a conventional square you can at least watch it being prepared and draw your own conclusions. With a drop-in the decisive work happened elsewhere, off camera, and the only people who know what was asked for are the ones who asked.

There is a playing consequence too. Higher clay content holds together and cracks in slabs rather than powdering, which delays the point at which a surface starts taking serious turn. Several drop-in venues therefore produce matches that are seam-friendly early, flat in the middle and then abruptly awkward on the last day, a shape that rewards squads with two quality quicks and punishes squads built around a front-line spinner.

Standardisation was the promise. What actually got standardised was who decides.